The Best American Poetry

Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s “One minute of dance a day”: Bearing witness to social transformation [By Tracy Danison]

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

As I write, Tuesday, 7 January 2025, the National Dance Theater at Palais du Chaillot has opened the season with a celebration of 10 years of dance performer and choreographer Nadia Vadori-Gauthier’s Une Minute de danse par jour (“One minute of dance a day”) project. In addition, Les Presses du reel has just published Une minute de danse par jour – 2015-2025 – Dix ans d'une œuvre pour notre temps.

During a talk published in The Best American Poetry/Beyond Words in 2017, Vadori-Gauthier told me that she put together Une minute as “an act of poetic resistance”, incarnating, even as it does today, a radical affirmation of personhood, asserting the central place of the body, especially, the female body, in public life.

In the wake of the first of the particularly vile terrorist attacks that marred the beginning and the end of 2015, along with the remarkable show of public solidarity for the République – that is, the liberal values the republic embodies – Vadori-Gauthier looked at her “resistance” as a “micro-political gesture” accompanying “a co-evolution toward a sweeter way of living”.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

Her sense of Une Minute has evolved: she now sees it as a telltale for a broader mutation in human relations away from the immediate and physical to the mediated and virtual.

Neither Vadori-Gauthier’s commitment to dance as a radical incarnation of personhood – she originally intended to wind up Une Minute after a year –  nor the evolution of her thinking about the project’s sense and purpose are surprising. There are events – I am thinking of Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine on 24 February 2022 or the 7 October 2023 massacres in Israel – the effects of which are and will remain impossible to adequately describe or account for in history, or, for that matter, in words. But these effects, nevertheless, ripple and echo through the courses of lives and, through those lives, shape common reality.  

What was done in Paris between 7 January and 13 November 2015 is certainly one such event and Une Minute’s persistence and evolution are one of the effects.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

On Wednesday, 7 January 2015 – that is, 18 Nivôse CCXXIII An of the French République – a pair of religious fanatics attacked the offices of the satirical-political weekly Charlie Hebdo, murdered 12 people and wounded 11 others. For dissing the Prophet Mohammed, the killers said. On Friday, 9 January, 20 Nivôse CCXXIII An, a lone gunman murdered four people in a kosher grocery. For being Jewish, he said.

On Friday, 11 January, 22 Nivôse CCXXIII An, about two million people (the city of Paris has a population of about 2 million), in addition to nearly four million people across the country, rallied in support of liberal values under the slogan Je suis Charlie (“I am Charlie”).

On Friday, 13 November, 23 Brumaire CCXXIV An – interesting to reflect that the revolutionary year begins at the September rentrée, the new year for schools, theaters and most other public living –  about 11 months later, using automatic rifles and suicide vests, nine religious fanatics murdered 130 people and wounded another 416.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

These murders took place, essentially, at cafés where people were sitting outdoors and at a popular music hall in the 11^th arrondissement of Paris and in a crowd near the Stade de France sports stadium in the near-suburb of Saint Denis. They done it, the murderers said, because Paris is Babylon, cursèd whore of Abraham’s Big Three religions in retrospect – sounding a rather sinister ecumenical note.

Vadori-Gauthier originally intended Une Minute de danse par jour to last a year or so. But the sum of the events and, I suppose, doing Une minute day by day, she made her ask, she says, “What do you do when you can do nothing”?

And from there forward, Une minute, once a micro-political gesture asserting the body’s centrality became what she could do:bear witness an ongoing transformation in the way we relate to one another.

 

"Une minute de danse par jour". Photo © Le prix de l'essence

While she’s been dancing her one minute a day, she observes, “The physical act of sharing and solidarity have been fading out”. She points out that, if, for instance, a smartphone means greater ability to keep in touch with friends or to access money, it also means changing the nature of the ancient acts of keeping in touch and accessing money.

“Personal identity has moved on-line,” Vadori-Gauthier says. And with the move, many of our most basic social interactions became virtualized transactions. “Buying a baguette or lending 20 bucks to a friend or getting a contact number, even giving change to a beggar, is no longer about touching hands or exchanging cards or scooping change on the counter or even tossing coins into an old hat*,” she observes.

Maybe the increasingly felt stress and alienation, along with real disorders of mood, all often blamed on “the internet”, are actually due to the loss of ordinary physical contact.

________________

Nadia Vadori-Gauthier is an influential and active performer, choreographer and teacher. In addition to her decade-long "Une minute de danse par jour project", she regularly works with such dance performance artists and organizations as Margaux Amoros or the experimental collective La Ville en feu, both of whose contributions to performance have been reviewed in the Best American Poetry/Beyond Words.

Unsurprisingly, Vadori-Gauthier has been including other dance performers and choreographers in Une minute de danse par jour. But it turns out that confronting “What do you do when you can do nothing”? is not just an increasingly pertinent question since 2015, answering it requires real personal investment, as well as Herculean commitment. “It takes four hours to make one minute of dance video”, Vadori-Gauthier told me. Getting more dancers contributing has her spending those four hours on the film editing application. More ironic still, she finds that she continues doing her minute of dance anyway, on her own. She calls it “shadow dancing”.

Contact Nadia Vadori-Gauthier through her dance company, Cie Le prix de l’essence or through the Une minute de danse par jour site, also home to a fantastic visual archive.

Maud Blandel: the naked eye of powerful dance experience [By Tracy Danison]

“L’Oeil-nu” by Maud-Blandel. Photo © Margaux Vendassi_Camille-D_Tonnerre

Maud Blandel’s dance performance L’Oeil nu (“The Naked Eye”) is a brilliant piece of choreographic flow, sensibility and Imagination, creating a special place of sight, sound, emotion, sense and personal meaning.  

L’Oeil nu is a case study in how space is shaped into place through set and how that shaping determines how performance (i.e., performers with spectators) will generate sense. I discussed this topic in an earlier post on Aurélien Dougé’s Aux Lointains, Magic movements, body and space. Like L’Oeil nu, Aux Lointains was a feature of Swiss Dance Week, which took place from 21 to 28 November 2024.

L’Oeil nu set is a fairly narrow rectangle with the entry on one end, where I’ve come in, a long open space between spectator chairs set in five rows on each of its two long sides and, on the far end, a reel-to-reel tape recorder in front of an open wall. The set is narrow enough to ensure that no spectator can get a vision of the whole. Performers are already there, spread along, rather than formed into, a performance center, always in some way nearer or farther from some spectators. It seems they are playing at the supremely ordinary picnic game of bowls.

 

“L’Oeil-nu” by Maud-Blandel. Photo © Pascal Gély

I’m a bit late coming in. I am hurrying along, sensitivity a bit heightened. In contrast to the spectator nearest the door and partially in common with 99% of the others, in order to find my place as a partial observer, I have to walk along the set as more or less “observable, observed, observing” by spectators and performers alike. The thirty seconds or less realtime involved here is three minutes felt time.

Rather than complement a performance that is essentially posture and interaction as at an elegant picnic – players playing: solo/solos/Individual/individuals, duo/duos/couple/couples, trio/trios/triangulars, small groups – light, sound and sense intrude into L’Oeil nu as agents of chaos or order rather than chaotic or orderly elements. Lighting is more like moon or star or sun light, stolidly there because it is there. The reel-to-reel recorder plays an audio loop of the zany, noisy, pointless aggressiveness of the old Looney Tunes cartoon characters, Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. The loop thrashes in the air, builds and builds and rebuilds on itself, uncovering and evolving its possibilities, is an event within the performance happening.  

T.S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men is projected in bilingual edition text, nearer me, on the farther wall. Since a spectator must turn their head far left just to see a bilingual format and un-focus from the performance to make some sense of what it says, identification and sense are made in follow-up mode: Aha! Multifoliate rose ... We grope together/Between the desire And the spasm… The Hollow Man! Men. Hollow Men. This is the way the world ends. That must be it. Mistah Kurtz-he dead/A penny for the Old Guy”/ / Remember us-if at all-not as lost/In death's dream kingdomThis is cactus land/As the perpetual star.

 

“L’Oeil-nu” by Maud-Blandel. Photo © Margaux Vendassi_Camille-D_Tonnerre

And all this, as best as I can describe it, I think shows just exactly the sensibility that Maud Blandel intended, associating the experience of the death of her father with “astrophysical phenomena…”, with “rotation, gravity and periodicity [and entropy]”. In the experience of L’Oeil nu, I do possess the experience of that death or death like it in the place where her piece takes me.  There, I feel its entire relativity, its inexpressible inevitability, normality, theanchorless happening – of a star, a person, a group – that seems always suddenly to collapse into its own significance(s), to become a hole dragging the dark and the light into it.

Before seeing L’Oeil nu, I had been listening to the New Yorker writer Derek Thompson and practitioner and academic Adam Mastroianni discuss the replication crisis in experimental psychology. After Blandel’s piece, brooding in understanding beyond words, I conclude once again that the ineffable gossamer of human experience for the time being makes scientifically valid experimental psychology mostly impossible.  Even if only because it’s impossible to cheat on it, we are all better off with dance performance than experimental psychology.

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I saw Maud Blandel’s “L’Oeil nu” 28 November at Theatre public de Montreuil, sponsored by Swiss Dance Week 2024, directed by Maud Blandel and performed by Bilal El Had, Karine Dahouindji, Maya Masse, Tilouna Morel, Oscar M. Damianaki, Romane Peytavin, sound by Flavio Virzì, Denis Rollet and Maud Blandel, lighting by
Daniel Demont and Florian Bach.  “L’Oeil nu” performance was a feature of Swiss Dance Week Paris, 2024, and included dance performance by Ruth Childs, Tabea Martin, Tiran Willemse and Nina Berclaz, as well as by Aurélien Dougé and Maud Blandel from 21 - 28 November 2024.

Defining cultural times: big booms, social movements and individual experience [By Tracy Danison]

“That Is No Longer Our Smoke Sign” (1950s) by Justino Herrera. Photo © Smithsonian American Art Museum

One of the unique things about the experience of people born after 1935 is the frequent cognitive dissonance induced by living long enough to have experienced the “eras” and “ages” of contemporary (potted) history.

Take the “Civil Rights Era 1950-1963”.

Born in 1955, I do remember the shock of running into a segregated water fountain in South Carolina and buying some candy in a “Negro” grocery in Georgia (and, notably, getting warned off afterwards, by a white man). I witnessed then, have witnessed since, witness now a lot of racism, legislated and cultural, have benefited a lot from legislation made to remedy it. But I can’t for the life of me locate a “Civil Rights Era”.

That’s because if “history” is something that has happened, which events, effects and outcomes are known and accounted for, then I’m living, along with others born on the tail-end of the Baby Boom, the struggle for race equality right now. Maybe the “Civil Rights Era” references a time period when elites were obliged to notice; Jim Crow may be down by law but not, by any means, out. The South is still solid, too.

“Uranium and Atomica Melancholica Idyll” (1945) by Salvador Dali. Photo © Fundació Gala-Salvador Dali

Again, born in 1955 and placed in a Catholic elementary school in Wadsworth, Ohio, I learned early to squat correctly under a school desk in the event of atomic attack. Also, I remember, am still today touched by, the scene from the Time Machine where the elderly Filby (Alan Young) urges George (Rod Taylor) to get to the shelter, atomic satellites, you see. I reckon, then, as well as the Civil Right Era, I’ve been living, have lived, am living the “Atomic Age”.

But “Atomic Age” doesn’t name the time I’ve experienced, nor the outlook I’ve developed or, for that matter, those of my fellow humans. “Atomic” is not the right adjective, “Age” not the right noun.

Uranium (Pink), Urangestein (Rosa),1992. Photo, Sigmar Polke © The Estate of Sigmar Polke 

“Atomic” puts aside the awful realization that “the bomber will always get through” as well as the actual experience and effects of the non-atomic firestorms at Dresden and elsewhere, the flattening of Warsaw, the flattening of Stalingrad, the flattening of Germany and then of Viet Nam, then of Afghanistan, now of Ukraine. If “Atomic Age” names the politics and social psychology involved in threats of indiscriminate mass killing with ecocide, why so? With a single exception none of the experienced horror has involved atomic booms.

Since 2022, for instance, not a week has gone by without Vladimir Putin, a fascist strongman who runs a now capitalist, neo-colonial Russia, threatening atomic war. It is said, and I believe it, the United States promises a non-atomic response more than adequate to such occasion. As previously, both sides hesitate. That all seems to me to be about getting in the best boom, not the atomic-est one.

“Bomb, Canopic Jar, Victims” (1967) by Nancy Spero © Nancy Spero

Instead of “Atomic Age”, why not “Best Boom Age” or “Age of Boom”, then? Because the absurdity of “Age of Boom” points, at least for poets and lovers of irony, the absurdity of using “Atomic Age” to name humanity’s urgent struggle to get a grip on its relationships with each other and the rest of nature.

So, cognitive dissonance was my first reaction to the exhibition Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique(“Artists confronting history – the Atomic Age”), which recently opened at the Musée de l’art moderne de Paris. The curators say that the invention of the atomic bomb and its use marked a turning point in the modern history of the atom, starting a “new”, second Atomic Age. Since that big boom at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, art, science and politics have become indissociable.

“Dub”: Amala Dianor’s sparkling and energetic hip hop fusion ballet consecrated in Paris [By Tracy Danison]

“Dub” by Amala-Dianor, Palais-des-Festivals, Cannes. Photo © Pierre Gondard

Amala Dianor’s sparkling and energetic hip hop fusion ballet, Dub, is a performance not to be missed – get a taste by clicking on the link for a whole performance at the Maison de la Culture de Grenoble, televised last February by Arte, the France-Germany culture/society media channel.

As a performance Dub is not only entertaining, intriguing and stimulating, it’s also at the Théâtre de la Ville- Sarah Bernhardt, which has featured, still does feature, contemporary dance with global cultural resonance. It is staged there at a time of real change in outlook and management in this country and around the globe. And considering its progress through province in 2024, I think it’s safe to say, it’s consecration as much as anything.

And, it may just be the fin de siècle feeling sloshing around in me as I sit one among the cool thousand there for the Paris première, but Dub does seem to me to mark a genuine, no-turning-back cultural change of gears – it’s forward, not retrograde movement.

Here is bare sketch of how the performance is conceived and rolled out. First off, the choreographic challenge, the choreographer’s notes say, is to bring together experts in such hip hop styles and variants as waacking, dancehall, electro, pantsula, new style or krump. The title “Dub”, in addition to implying a transformation of one language into another, say the notes, conjures the real-time in situ remixing of the soundtrack associated with reggae music. Set décor is inspired by the spontaneously developed performance spaces of young, social media dance performance entrepreneurs. The show’s performers, hailing from the US, South Africa, and France, indeed, have global careers and crews (troupes) of their own.

 

“Dub” by Amala-Dianor, Palais-des-Festivals, Cannes. Photo © Pierre Gondard

What I see from my seat is a dee-jay/sound-maker – that would be either Grégoire Korganow or Awir Leon – left-centered among symmetrical and stacked frames and color-light props. The set strikes me as a full-circle play off the 60s TV dance show Hollywood A Go Go, in which the tech and set try to evoke the crowded immediacy of live performance. In Dub, the set focuses individual energies and discrete movement that might otherwise get lost in immediacy of a crowd. Inside the set, a first dance performer, a man, does a very aerial (hands and torso) take on what says to me, who have a tatty cliché of Indian dance in my head, “Bharatanatyam”. This folds into an hour or so of learning, borrowing, imitating, integrating and fusing in a kaleidoscoping of solo, couple and group encounter or “battles”. Each performer and contributor, dee-jay and set designer, too, visually “pass through” roles as the performance rolls forward. If the piece means to take us along with these amazing bodies and entrancing sounds, the end-goal of the piece, I understand, is my sense of the sum of the performed encounters.

And from this Spartan blueprint, over my free cocktail and petit fours, I get that, first off, Dub is a culmination of a process I earlier called a geopoetic culture of the universal citizen: local, even “individual”, culture is a subset of the structuring global culture.

Just above, I called the piece “a sparkling and energetic hip hop fusion ballet”: “Hip hop” because it articulates around breaking and battle. Dub is “fusion” because it includes not just traditional and contemporary dance styles but also subculture tropes. Most striking and encouraging for me, though, is the TV-influenced technology/scenography/esthetics that spotlight live performance rather than “enhance” and distract from its anfractuosities and fissures. Dub is “sparkling” because Amala Dianor, an individual, makes it so. The fundamental sense of hip hop is in individuation (highlighting the unique identity, rather than the competitive advantages, of the performer).

 

“Dub” by Amala-Dianor, Palais-des-Festivals, Cannes. Photo © Pierre Gondard

Finally, Dub is “ballet” because it is rooted in hip hop. Indeed, hip hop is now the reference form that ballet, “an artistic dance form done to music dating back to the Renaissance”. This is a significant change because it signals, I believe, adoption of new social beliefs.

Let’s put it this way. I believe – but given that I never have had the knack of noting the structuring moments of my life, how can I possibly know?  – that the very first dance performance I ever saw was The Firebird ballet. Though I’ve always inclined toward the spiritual and the free, the modern and the contemporary in dance, my sense of what those forms of dance are has referenced the Firebird.

Thinking on my experience of Dub, going forward, I think I’ve changed in or want to change in Firebird for “a dance form that highlights individual movement originating in the African-heritage community of the United States”.  Hip hop fits the ballet bill. It is nothing if not a (highly-coded) form, and if it’s not necessarily to music, hip hop always uses sound to get a body to where it’s going; nobody believes in history as points on a time line like the Renaissance or the Atomic Age anymore – hip hop is about process in space-time and so are we all now, I think; until further notice, how is why.   

There’s a lot to be said about getting on board with hip hop – its underlying philosophy of equality and solidarity and its energy liberates. But if it puts aside achievement for individuation, it also lacks tragedy, sympathy for the devil. I reckon that’s a reflection of hip hops origins in the puritan USA, where there’s no tragedy, only failure. Getting it wrong is a vaguely absurd zero-sum pantomime: You idiot, Lear, ya done kilt ‘er! Now those awful bitches are in charge!

I’ll hope for the best, see what happens. Hip hop is, as I say, about process.

________

I saw “Dub”, dance performance choreographed by Amala Dianor on Wednesday, 11 December 2024, at Théâtre de la Ville- Sarah Bernhardt, Paris,  with set and sound design by, respectively, Grégoire Korganow and Awir Leon and performed by Slate Hemedi Dindangila, Romain Franco, Jordan John Hope, Enock Kalubi Kadima, Mwendwa Marchand, Kgotsofalang Joseph Mavundla, Sangram Mukhopadhyay, Tatiana Gueria Nade, Yanis Ramet, Germain Zambi and Asia Zonta 

Dub in France & Europe, Spring & Summer 2025

• Le Corum, Montpellier Danse, France - 7 February 2025
• Le Forum, Fréjus, France - 11, 12 February 2025
• Grand Théâtre du Luxembourg, LUX - 28 February 2025
• Équinoxe, Scène nationale de Châteauroux - 4 March 2025
• L’Onde, Vélizy, France - 7 March 2025
• Le Bateau feu, Dunkerque /Le Grand Bain - 11, 12 March 2025
• Opéra de Limoges tournée LEVEL UP (extrait de DUB) 14, 15 March 2025
• Théâtre du Nord, CDN, Lille /Le Grand Bain - 18, 19 March 2025
• Théâtre Sénart, scène nationale - 30 May 2025  
• One Dance Week, Plovdiv, Bulgaria - 4, 5 June 2025
• Espace 1789, Saint Ouen, France - 29 May 2025
• One dance week, Plovdiv, Bulgaria - 27, 28 June 2025
• Festival COLOURS, Stuttgart, Germany - 7,8 July 2025
• Grand Palais, Paris - 10 July 2025
• ImPulsTanz festival, Vienna, Austria. Dates to be determined

 

“Chroniques d’une exploratrice”: Web experience on stage (and about time, too) [By Tracy Danison]

“Chroniques d’une exploratrice” by Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent. “@RabbitHowl: Go see Osaka, there’s a box full of straw”. Photo Courtesy L’Etoile du nord © Alice Gozlan

Until Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent’s theater performance Chroniques d’une exploratrice (“An Explorer’s Chronicle”), I’d never seen Web experience on stage, theatricalized. I don’t mean I hadn't read depictions of a fantasy “cyber-world” such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer or seen such fantastic allegories of real life as the Wachowski bros. film The Matrix made into stage plays. I mean I hadn't seen a stage portrayal of actual human Web experience: sitting typing on a keyboard, scrolling, watching video and hearing audio clips, making acquaintance via pseudonymous written-language chat boxes, emoting, usually alone, in a personal space.

More than any other form of art, except pure dance, of course, theater performance of a thing can help a body understand it as an actual phenomenon. Think of all the plays based on conversations – think the B-52 crew in Dr. Strangelove. With the United States soon to be run by Web trolls, cranks and personas, it’s about time somebody did.

Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent build the plot of Chroniques d’une exploratrice around Alice Gozlan’s discovery of the Web’s thriving white-supremacist, or what I think of as a “Nazi”, world. That is harrowing and entertaining but I am inclined to pretty much ignore it here in order to talk about its theatrical framework.

As a framework, Chroniques is as savvy and pertinent as could be. Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent create a place and atmosphere appropriate to the physical and psychic action involved in Web exploration that Alice Gozlan can then meaningfully perform.

A conversation play needs a table and a hidden subject, a war play, a commander and belabored guesswork, a murder play, a weapon and secret motive. A Web play needs a screen (with keyboard or access-equivalent) a thirst to know.

The set of Chroniques has three different screens, one large screen set center and two smaller ones set back, stage right, to create a “screen environment” where Gozlan can watch others and herself, and be watched, by herself and others. With the “red-pill-blue-pill” scene from The Matrix running on one, the two smaller screens visually betray a larger Web reality or context.

The screen environment brings out the particularity that of Web interface requires a systematic self-othering of the person-exploring it. The person who decides to sit at the keyboard is the person who observes and authorizes but does not directly operate the Web persona (handle, pseudo or identifier), the authorized Other, as it were, that does on-screen/on-line interaction.

How the person and the Othered Web persona are tethered seems to me the heart of any effective portrayal of Web experience.

To theatricalize the Othering link of person and Web persona, Gozlan and Lorent use the three available theatrical spaces: stage-line, set and seats. Performer Alice Gozlan first sits on the edge of the stage as informant, then takes a seat in the audience as observer, then enters the set space as both Web Explorer persona and stage performer of the Web Experience. A telephone/voice relationship with a self-involved partner whose life seems to move parallel to rather than with her own highlights the Web Explorer Alice Gozlan’s alone-ness in an environment that is otherwise home.

The whole effect of this is to show an Alice Gozlan person and a Web Explorer persona living as a unit in an ordinary living space, a “home” that is also a sort of Wonderland, full of unsettling encounters, relations and adventures. This sense of home certainly undercuts the traditional image of safety and comfort; the place of “outside” is also the place of “inside”; the intruder is within the home and outside it.

Chroniques depicts a Web that is only as dark as its explorer, or maybe as dark as their itch of curiosity, wants it to be; if snuff films or Russian state propaganda are slithering into an Explorer’s YouTube feed, the Web Explorer has in some way brought them on. Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer relates how she came to explore the internet outside her established yoga, cooking, and how-to algorithms – by trying a little, pressing against the rabbit hole of her ordinary algorithmic world.

 

“Chroniques d’une exploratrice” by Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent. Photo Courtesy L’Etoile du nord © Alice Gozlan

 

This is important verisimilitude: the tether that links the person and persona is thick and also guilt-inspiring.

Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona finally tumbles into the parallel rabbit-hole of misogynists and Nazis through a single link. The links’ logics send her much further along, working pretty much in the same way that my curiosity about the UFO hearings has generated videos claiming that the human reptiles I all too often run into are, in fact, reptile-like alien invaders masquerading as human beings.

As an “othered self” and operating on what is perceived as “the other side of the screen”, the Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona has a “web object” to structure a psyche appropriate to the conditions of its environment – analogous to, if not surely an, “emotional object”. Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona finds her object in un-localized, livesurveillance-camera image of a woman alone on a mattress on a floor.

The woman on the mattress has a bruise on her arm.   

In real life and Web experience, an object, even an emotional object, is seen: there is some association between seeing it and the emotions raised by the sight. In a rainstorm, for instance, from my kitchen window, a half mile of so up the hillside, I see a mother neighbor smoking on her terrace. Her predicament moves me just as the predicament of the solitary woman on the mattress moves Alice Gozlan.

Both objects are seen, both are out of reach, but only Alice Gozlan’s woman on the mattress is unreachable, forcing the sort of dissociation of emotion and experience that characterizes a range of common psychic disorders.   

Alice Gozlan’s Web persona doesn’t just leave its Alice Gozlan person dissociated. It adumbrates helplessness: it can’t communicate with its emotional object, nor locate it, nor come to its aid, nor even hope to come to its aid, nor, since she controls neither the access machinery nor the algorithms that shape her journey, even find it, or find it again. Completing this awful tableau of dissociation and helplessness inflicted on the person through the Web persona is the uncertainty surrounding the object itself. I know as best as a body here-below can know it, that the smoking mother through my window exists – if I felt any uncertainty, I would take it as a sign that I should adjust my anti-psychotic medicine. Not so for the woman on the mattress. The persona delivers an image of an object that may or may not be fake. If image-object is fake, the feelings it arouses in Alice Gozlan, as deeply felt as they may be, are, insofar as the image may be a manipulation, fake, too.

And, finally, all the while, there is a possibility that the Web object is a real woman and that the person Alice Gozlan is a nasty voyeur, and a nasty fascinated voyeur, too. It’s her responsibility: who forced Alice Gozlan to go Nazi-hunting?

The dramatic thread of Chroniques d’une exploratrice mixes the Web Exploration into the world. In its denouement, Real and Web worlds touch as Alice Gozlan, first through betrayal, when she is doxed, and then when other Web personas take real form in her physical world. As I watched the plot roll out, I couldn’t help but make out a structure that parallels with those incomprehensible Gnostic tracts I ploughed through so long ago for my thesis … Indeed, I just call Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona, “Seeker Alice” and say that her goal is getting knowledge of mysteries (otherwise closed to her) rather than “looking into white supremacy-nazis”. I then think of the “chapters” that mark the dramatic timeline are “rungs” on the ladder to enlightenment, I could very well be reading Hermes Trismegistus.

 

“Chroniques d’une exploratrice” by Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent. Photo Courtesy L’Etoile du nord © Alice Gozlan

 

Of course, the “red-pill, blue-pill, ignorance-or-knowledge” narrative, as well as the routine of psychic dissociation certainly lend themselves to the notion that Web exploration is experienced as a “spiritual journey”. But what convinces me of a connection to mystic/spirit cult tradition is the way Web personas relate to one another, especially as “guide-and-seeker”, a relationship often found in spiritual journey narratives other than Gnostic ones.  

There has grown up on the Web just such a culture of semi-conflictual relationships between “seekers”, “adepts”, “guides” and “masters”. Guides, adepts and masters are often very ambiguous personas, with obscure motives and little patience for seekers and adepts and who possess “special” knowledge of one sort or another – I’m thinking here of Robert Crumb’s Mr. Natural character. In the real world we have an example of Donald Trump pronouncing, very much in the rhetorical vein of @RabbitHowl, from his very own platform.

I evoked Gnosticism.  With oracular language, “Q”, the cryptic, apocalyptic Web persona, said to be an anonymous state “insider”, guides many a “queer thinker” across the wide world to broader truths about what is really going on. The “Q” handle references a theoretical source – “true” – gospel [Word of God]”. Web Explorer Alice Gozlan’s guide, “@RabbitHowl”, who attaches himself to her because of her curiosity (and shows her, among other things, the woman-Web object on the mattress) also doxes her, undoing her Web Explorer persona and returning her to her reality as a solitary woman at home. Her guide thus makes her vulnerable in reality to all the Nazi creepiness she’s become acquainted with on the Web.

Alice Gozlan’s Web Explorer persona also has an equally ambiguous “protector” with the handle/persona “LaCréature”. This noun has the same semantic field as the English cognate and, I think, off the top of my head, probably references Kreacher, in the very popular Harry Potter series, the conflicted house elf left to Harry Potter by the divided House of Black. LaCréature is backed up by a Web real world gang called “Animals of the Night”: totems, ids, sprites.

As from all voyages, Alice Gozlan, the person and performer, returns transformed. As Chroniques has it, the transformation involves both recognition of the person’s real vulnerability and solitariness and the existence of a – formerly – unacknowledged and ugly world.

Be wary, friends, theatrical form often mirrors real-world content.

Good job, Alice Gozlan, for a quality performance and with co-creator Zacharie Lorent, a really intelligent and original staging.

______

I saw “Chroniques d’une exploratrice” created by Alice Gozlan and Zacharie Lorent, performance by Alice Gozlan, at L’Etoile du nord on 7 November 2024, with sound by Nicolas Hadot, lighting installation and video with Simon Anquetil and Clément Chebli, and costumes and set design by Marjolaine Mansot.

 

Magic movements, body and space: “Aux Lointains” by Aurélien Dougé [By Tracy Danison]

“Aux Lointains” by Aurélien Dougé. Photo © Olivier Miche

When we were kids, we believed in magic movements – I don’t know where we got that from but we got it; I myself remember using one to see off a troublesome priest. As adults we haven’t lost the belief, though we stay discrete about it and sometimes, thanks to academic psychology, even think such movements mere brain flubbery.

Aurélien Dougé’s wonderful solo dance performance, Aux Lointains, that is to say, Dougé’s body and will in the low hum of an organ continuo and the shifting dark and light over the about 100 square meters of stage, shows that we kids were right to believe and adults are, too.

Magic movements do exist, there are people skilled in them and they work just fine in the real world, stimulating pleasure, understanding and Imagination – things we can’t really get enough of.

Aux Lointains (“In the distance” or “Remembrance”), is intended as a choreography of remembrances and its 45 minutes or so of precise and deliberate movement reveals to the spectator how to find a body’s place not just in past-time, but, strikingly, in space. “Reveals” because it uses movement magic and “find”, because the movement proves (as it must) that space is a thing as well as a property, like gravity or light. So, as with light or gravity, a body has to negotiate it, find its place within it.

“Aux Lointains” by Aurélien Dougé. Photo © Margaux Vandassi

For this spectator, the movement magic goes something like this:

Dougé establishes “space” by nonchalantly appearing suddenly in the stage area, from left, as I recall, from behind the seating. He then moves a hand, then both, then both hands along with his feet, then his legs and arms. Seemingly simultaneously, he shows all this mobile body in light of his torso and head. This movement defines the form and shape of Dougé as a body and, at the same time, through the defining movement, points the form of himself as a will. As he defines his body and will, he is also moving into the stage, which I am perceiving from his body and will. It is making room for him. I see that it defines and shapes itself around Dougé, in and over his wake.

At some point along the 45 minutes of Dougé’s performance, I am convinced that space is not occupied but fit into; that a body finds a place, a body does not take it. Remembrance, but also identity and culture and so much else, is exactly this: making into, finding and fitting into a thing that appears so vast as to be void. And with this sense of things, I recall the experience of elegance and poise, feel here and alive, remember the Zen notion of presence.

____________

I saw "Aux Lointains" by Aurélien Dougé, cie Inkörper, at Atelier de Paris CDCN, 29 November 2024. The performance was produced for the Atelier de Paris CDCN and part of Swiss Dance Week 2024, sponsored by the Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris. Creation, set and performance by Aurélien Dougé with assistance on choreography by Cindy Van Acker and assistance in lighting by Luc Gendroz and live sound by Rudy Decelière.

Virginie Roux-Cassé (re-)discovers the sainted woman [By Tracy Danison]

Sainte Jeune Fille à la Licorne © Virginie Roux-Cassé

Carnets pour l’exile: According to tradition, every exile needs to wander aimlessly from time to time, not so much to find a shard of home at the next whiskey bar but to see what there is to see when the city has become your life to live.

Also, a good-hearted exile should think about year-end presents for those at home who have not yet been arrested.

 

Sainte Embrasée © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I ran into Virginie Roux-Cassé‘s painting, and Virginie herself, quite by accident some years ago now. Her latest exhibition, called “Les Saintes”, she says, is inspired by an encounter with the Roma holy patron Sainte Sara la Noire, repudiated African Queen of King Herod and servant to holy patrons Saintes Marie-Jacobus and Marie-Salomé*.

 

Sainte Marthe 1 © Virginie Roux-Cassé

“The people pray to [the saints’ icons], venerate them, adore them,” she told me during her opening cocktail the other day, “They dress them, they cover them with, they pile on them, various-patterned, many-colored, golden, ornamented scarves, tunics, coats, crowns, jewels, crosses, rosaries…The beauty, divinity, humanity just bowled me over”.

 

Sainte Sara La Noire © Virginie Roux-Cassée

From that experience, she decided to investigate the lives and deaths of woman Catholic saints: more than a year of portraits in tempera and engravings on the theme is the result.

 

Sainte Marthe, engraving © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I have two paintings by Virginie Roux-Cassé. The one, acrylic or water-based housepaint on fiberboard, is a tilted dry sink (?), a tray (?) of apples hanging just over my dining table. Somebody picked these impish apples from an untended tree in (Virginie’s?) back garden.

 

Sainte Marthe 2 © Virginie Roux-Cassé

The other picture –  I call it “Bird Cage” –, in clotted acrylic with smudged newsprint collage, perches above my talk-on-the-phone-red-overstuffed-armchair (since my mother died mostly used with my Son, who lives far away, and Karine, with whom I like to touch a word when she’s away).

 

Sainte Solange © Virginie Roux-Cassé

The Bird Cage is, I think, a lamp or lampshade in crinkly paper (flame-resistant crinoline?) and thick structuring wire with, set alongside it, a small vase. The vase has a big twig of (cherry?) blossoms jammed in it, too big for it. (‘Though you’d not guess it to see her walking home in the evening, Karine sometimes tears off flowering twigs or plucks up flowers and brings them home to make a “found bouquet”. It shocks me. Please don’t call the cops.)

 

Sainte Véronique © Virginie Roux-Cassé

In the foreground of it all I’ve described is a triplet of round fruits. One of the fruits is a distinctly different color than the other two, set slightly but distinctly behind. I sometimes try to make out the smudged newsprint but I’ve never succeeded.

 

Sainte Phanie © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I bought the impish apples and Bird Cage because Virginie Roux-Cassé’s take on the world around is not mine but is accessible to me, opens a garden gate for my feelings and my imagination. What’s that poem about the path not taken?

 

Sainte La Vierge Stephanie © Virginie Roux-Cassé

Like everybody else, contemporary artists such as Virginie Roux-Cassé have to come to grips with the increasingly vast pile of past and present and their infinite substacks:  artists, oeuvres, esthetics, theories, concepts, approaches, materials and techniques. Most triangulate their hands at a point between story-telling and radical expression of a reality uniquely within them and what I think of as "esthetic life extensionism".

 

Sainte Mariam © Virginie Roux-Cassé

For story-telling, put somebody like, say, “post-black” painter Rashid Johnson, who did, notably, the interior “Broken Nine” mosaic at the New York’s Metropolitan Opera. For unique reality, think, say, of Jorinde Voigt, who paints the bio-quantic reality that undergirds our ordinary here-below. For esthetic life extensionism, an artist called Leon Loewentrautsprings to mind. Loewentraut has mastered a certain "Picasso signature style" that enables him to target an Audi-driving market that won’t pay for one of Picasso’s many thousands of second-rate squiggles, can’t afford the real thing, but, nevertheless, aspires to class and taste. 

 

Sainte Blandine © Virginie Roux-Cassé

Virginie Roux Cassé's triangulates someplace between all three. Her distinction is that when I look at her work, I feel her standing looking with me. She's not whispering as an other artist might; sharing the experience of visual emotion is enough.

 

Sainte Jeanette © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I once visited the upper-story greenhouse that serves as her workshop. I was taken aback to see - some unfinished, some painted over with other styles - in recognizable painterly styles lopped about the place. They were well done, too!

 

Sainte Ecervelée © Virginie Roux-Cassé

I was taken aback because for me the thing that has marked for me Virginie Roux Cassé's work is that it reminds me of nothing else that I've run into as I look around the world. Among the many excellent painters active today, Virginie Roux Cassée is my very own Le Douanier Rousseau.

 

Sainte Marthe (leading her monster) © Virginie Roux-Cassé

 

Later, it struck me that the discarded “style” paintings did not represent a search to produce an effect or a search for a technique or for a style but rather represent her effort to understand, maybe to find and isolate, an effect on an (herself as an) onlooker. Doing that, she brings out my "emotion of seeing": in dance, I would say that the choreography has enabled the "sensibility" that enables the experience of dance performance.
____

*Saint Sara la Noire is patron of the Roma (or "Gypsy") folk. Many of them claim an origin in India, an, indeed, Wikipedia identifies Saint Sara with the goddess Kali. Saints Mary-Salome, Mother of Saint John, author of the Apocalyptic gospel, Mary-Jacobus, Mother of Saint James the Apostle, along with Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ companion in love, were among the original disciples of Christianity’s Messiah. Most were witness to Jesus Christ's Resurrection. All are mentioned in the canonical gospels. Fleeing Israel in a rudderless boat sometime in the third decade of the present era, these woman disciples of Jesus providentially washed up on the French coast. They were long believed to be the founders of Christianity in France. The pilgrimage site for Saint Sara is at Les Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, a village in the Camargue.

Contact Virginie Roux-Cassé through her website: virginierouxcasse.com

Carnets pour l’exile: Aina Alègre, “Réverbérations - Etude 8”: the drummer or the drum? [By Tracy Danison]

“Révérberations - Etude 8”, Aina Alègre: “Girl, I have a lot of uncontrolled movements”. Photo © Martin Argryroglo

As the days go by on pretty much the same dull plan, an exile, as is well known, may get le bourdon, “the bumblebee” or “dull vibes”: up, coffee, listen to the bad news and lies from home, wait for noon, petit blanc, shot at six, carafes of piquet for the rest of the evening, especially if politics comes up.

An exile already with or expecting le bourdon would do well to search out all-round performer choreographer Aina Alègre – I’ve written about her here as a first order energy weaver fitter and genre-breaker: Fitting the right energies instead of matching genres may not be an act of love and resistance but it works well.

Start with her 45-minute solo R-A-U-X-A to get the blood up and moving. As Ry Cooder put it: Folks, it’s a sight! Alègre grabs a body up and shows them how human movement works within the material world -  light, sound and things - to create rhythm, dance and place. To use genre to get at the experience: the difference between Alègre’s dance and, say, the Flamenco gestural from which she picks the most power-infused movement, is that Alègre’s tradition is herself and that she is the movement that animates the world around, not the instrument that plays out an esthetic.

“R-A-U-X-A”, Aina Alègre. Photo © Guillaume-Fraysse

At all times, as her R-A-U-X-A solo shows, Aina Alègre’s creativeness is a universal antidote to the saddening buzz of exile’s existential bagpipe, but her Reverberations 8, because analytical, just one phrase of a series of in-situ performances called ÉTUDES (built around the movements, gestures, dances, figures and narratives associated to tapping or hammering), seems specially designed as therapy for it.

The word “réverbération” points both glimmering light and echo of sound.

Reverberations - Etude 8 takes place, with two exceptions, in silence or, better, in Silence, where all sound comes from. No sound track. No talking. As a set, it is, left-toward center, a handsome full set of drums and full right to center, a projection of meditations or strictures or pensées on a bright-white parking garage breeze-block back wall … – Enter, from far left space, Maenad-like – … setting out, on a repeating loop of commentary and anecdote, Aina Alègre’s ontolo-graphy as a drummer drumming-drum.

The drum set features a clicking metronome clipped to the cymbal stand, which just does not compass Aina Alègre’s moving, moving, moving inner energy, which opens, sustains and closes the show.

 

“Révérberations - Etude 8”, Aina Alègre. Photo © Martin Argryroglo

As I switch my eyes between her energy dance and the ontolography scrolling on the wall, her ontolography speaks of an early fascination with drums… She was born in 1986… Drums as a thing to hide behind and drumming as a thing to put her in contact with the world… In 1992 she was drumming for a band called Gambas, of coming to drumming through an act of will… It is not beating of the drum that creates sound and rhythm but the nimbleness of the energy flow beating it; women with ears, hear … And more that gets beyond me…

When she – Finally! About half-way through the performance – briefly starts rhythming one of two toms mounted on the kick drum  – all of a few minutes – the metronome has disappeared, is notably absent. She riffs with sticks that start with clicks which turns rapidly into drumming, personal verve and then to simple, resonant, pure sense. Later on, she taps the snare. I think then she’s not drumming: she’s looking for the glimmer and echo of her movement on the drum.

I forget how Reverberations 8 ends.

As people were leaving I was sitting looking at the stage hearing the echo of Alègre’s words and I heard many praise her drumming skill. We’d all been enchanted.

____

I saw “Réverbérations - Etude 8” on 8 November at Ménagerie du Verre, which continues strong after the death of Marie Thérèse Allier, its founder and proprietor, on smaller productions of contemporary dance performance. See Beyond Words: “Marie-Thérèse Allier, literary talk, dance-performance criticism” and “Marie-Thérèse Allier’s Ménagerie de Verre: forty years enabling dance otherwise queerly”. I most recently saw “R-A-U-X-A” on 13 November 2024 at Carreau du Temple in the Marais. “R-A-U-X-A” wears very well.

“R-A-U-X-A” places & dates, 2025

29 March 2025 – Conde Duque, Madrid, Espagne

22, 23 & 24 May 2025 - Chaillot – Théâtre national de la danse, Paris, France

Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley leave the Ballet de Lorraine: how to say goodbye good [By Tracy Danison]

“CRWDSPCR” by Merce Cunningham, v. Jacobsson/Caley 2024. Photo © Ronan Muller, CCN-Ballet de Lorraine

Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley are leaving the Ballet de Lorraine at the end of 2024, so on 6 November 2024 I went to see their swan song at the Opéra national de Lorraine in Nancy.

My goodbye to them is to point everybody else to their legacy in the smart and effective development of people and to develop talent. I’ve already talked about how they made of the Ballet de Lorraine an enterprise of “many in one”, rather than “one from many”. I’ve written about this in Performing time present - Petter Jacobsson’s Ballet de Lorraine and Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley: a point in time, a line, the line, a period, instantly and forever. Their vision of choreographic enterprise suits the human needs of performers and prepares them for the challenge of repertories that span not only time and taste but multiple socio-cultural paradigms. As promoters of culture, Jacobsson, born in Stockholm, and Caley, born in Michigan, USA, who met in early 1990s New York and have led the Ballet de Lorraine for better than 10 years now, make no secret of their appreciation of the opportunities of an open world system as well as France’s unique system for encouraging and sustaining arts and culture. Big fans of Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, as artists, they are careful to frame their work and the work of others, new and old, as part of the common evolution: Ballet de Lorraine through the telescope: moving house and mountains, civilizational change, time, space and dance experience.

So, that’s what I think.

However, like so many others in my increasingly long life, Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley have chosen to say goodbye in their own, irrational, inexplicable, ineffable way, forcing me to go to the trouble of interpreting said “goodbye”.

First, what’s the traditional protocol for goodbye?

In antiquity, Archilochus mocks the barbarian waving the shield he (Archilochus) had left behind as he (Archilochus) decamped from a losing fight. I believe Archilochus also mentions that when he’s dead, he’ll miss eating figs. I guess that “goodbye” has always been personal about the individual.

But, contrary to what study of Archilochus might suggest, goodbye is not just about the sovereign “I” decamping or dying. It’s also about “You & I“ and “our” Separating(s). Not just what the one good-byer leaves behind but what the other good-byer keeps from the encounter. Acknowledging this truth, Italian-speakers say “Ciao [Baby] [Asshole]” for hello and “Ciao [Baby] [Asshole]” for goodbye: “hello-goodbye”.

 

“Fugitive archives” by Latifa Laâbissi. Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

In the vein of hello-goodbye, the Venerable Bede’s Deathsong uses the Northumbrian to suggest that

Fore thaem neidfaerae ‖ naenig uuiurthit
thoncsnotturra, ‖ than him tharf sie
to ymbhycggannae ‖ aer his hiniongae
huaet his gastae ‖ godaes aeththa yflaes
aefter deothdaege ‖ doemid uueorthae.

Excuse my clunky here-belowness in perspective, but it seems to me that, in a proper hello-goodbye, nothing can beat the traditional advice to prospective brides.

We are all (helpless child) brides of our little destinies, not so? And, upon saying goodbye, the feckless maiden says hello to the knowing wife and to meet the occasion must have, “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.”

For the first part of their hello-goodbye – Program 1 – Jacobsson and Caley chose to hand their stage to Ballet de l’Opéra - Grand Avignon for a performance of Emilio Calcagno’s D’un matin de Printemps (2022). Calcagno, whose work has been characterized as “unclassifiable”, was born in Sicily, came to study dance in France in 1989 and stayed to make good.

D’un matin de Printemps, with 14 dance performers and three musicians, uses tableau-style choreographies and the electronic sound of composer Matteo Franceschini to bring its audience into a fresh, slantendicular, connection with classic composers Ravel, Debussy, Satie and Boulanger. “I chose 19^th and 20^th French composers [for D’un matin de Printemps] because this rich, elegant and, especially, artistically free part of the contemporary period invites diversity of interpretation…. Everything in it lends itself re-interpretation: rhythm, pulse, movement, tempo…”

The second part – Program 2 –  includes CRWDSPCR by Merce Cunningham, Fugitive Archives by Latifa Laâbissi and Mesdames et Messieurs by Jacobsson and Caley.

 

“Mesdames et Messieurs” by Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley. Photo © Laurent Philippe

 

First conjured in 1993, CRWDSPCR – like the mechanical signaling gestures that mark the piece, the title is a nod and wink at punch-card bureaucratic “condensation” of language – is an iconic visualization of technological civilization: frenetic movement and urgent information high in color. Also, CRWDSPCR recalls Cunningham’s (and John Cage’s) revolutionary notion that choreography and music are independently intended, co-existing rather than joined, in dance performance. With a performance for the Montpellier Dance festival, CRWDSPCR became part of the Ballet de Lorraine’s repertory in July, 2024.

Both Jacobsson and Caley danced with Cunningham’s company from 1993 into the naughties.Laâbissi’s Fugitive Archives and Mesdames et Messieurs were part of Jacobsson’s and Caley’s celebration of the centenary of the Ballets Suédois (in Paris). They premiered 18 May 2022 at the Opéra national de Lorraine at Nancy. Fugitive, for eight woman-only performers in checkered dresses with bell flairs and, along with a Wizard-of-Oz-Munchkin esthetic, something of the chaotic Shadoks cartoon to them – troubling, droll, grotesque and erotic. Fugitive, a performance that is almost a dance, borrows heavily from the imagery – but not the choreography – archives of the Marchand des oiseaux from Ballets Suèdois.

Mesdames et Messieurs is a reinvention of Cinésketch, a one-shot slapstick parody of “adultery comedy” created by the painter Francis Picabia and directed by writer René Clair and presented in the dying days of the Ballets Suèdois. Petter Jacobsson and Thomas Caley present an (almost) entirely masculine cast enjoying the game of love in a wacky and colorful Eros Triumphant.

Later, I joined them for dinner at a brasserie near the central train station called L’Excelsior, a place where the beer advertisements as well as the woodwork and stained glass are works of art. I asked how D’un matin de Printemps, CRWDSPCR, Fugitive Archives and Mesdames et Messieurs represent “something new, old, borrowed and blue”.

Thomas Caley’s answer is succinct. He points out that all the pieces are doing something “new” as performed “now”, whether in concept or choreography and or as pure invention, as re-invention, or as renewal of or from something “old” and “borrowed”: concept, choreography, phrases, figures, sounds, music, décors, costumes, visuals, intentions.

Jacobsson nods agreement at this: nothing is pulled from thin air.

But the couple is flummoxed when I ask “What about something blue?”, which I have explained is, traditionally, a garter, the symbolic gateway to the erotic. So, I do it for them. I point Mesdames et Messieurs a male-male game of love that, quite accidentally and with no ill-effect on what I might have called a “homoerotic” review, can have two women in it.

Hello-goodbye.

Hans Josephsohn, sculptor of genius, artistic heritage, Solomon Grundy and Emily Dickinson [By Tracy Danison]

Untitled, undated, Hans Josephsohn. Photo © Musée de l’art moderne de Paris

Sick of your compatriots after months of gazing anxiously into their inscrutable faces? Thinking of Paris as a place where you might get away from all that? It’s not all a bad idea. Remember, though, that, here-below, in the hell nobody’s yet out of, a body’s only defense against reality is absorption in something interesting.

Thus disabused, a body may, for a while, calmly say goodbye to the home front with a visit to an interesting exhibit called Josephsohn vu par Albert Oehlen, a life-time retrospective of the sculpture of Hans Josephsohn at the Musée de l’art modern de Paris.

It’s hard to find an adjective to describe Josephson’s work. He kept himself to himself pretty much; he has been little shown outside Switzerland. Albert Oehlen, a contemporary multi-materials artist who first came to attention as an art scene bad boy in Germany in the 1980s, and is curator of the exhibit, discovered Josephsohn’s work when he visited Kesselhaus Josephsohn, a dedicated storage and display space. Kesselhaus Josephsohn was founded in 2003 as part of the Sitterwerk arts and culture complex in St Gallen, Switzerland, where Oehlen lives.  Oehlen’s adjective is to organize the show around the sculptor’s life-process of creation: chronological, closing with a totem by contemporary sculptor Rebecca Warren (b. 1964) - taken from Oehlen’s personal collection. Josephsohn’s all there, Oehlen’s adjective says, words just get in the way.

Oehlen’s right.

Untitled surface,1950-1951, Hans Josephsohn. Photo © Tracy Danison

I was a little breathless when I got to the top of the stair where the exhibit begins. When I looked up, I stopped wheezing to goggle breathless: morsels of whole sense, visual haikus. Haikus, haikus everywhere and nothing to do but look. This Hans Josephsohn guy is about how eyes make feelings, processes of creation.

In plaster or bronze, bits of wall, classic-shape kores, faces and figures capture visual expectation and form. A little section of stone wall full enough image to make signs enough to make portents… But then, it’s a stone wall, natural, made, size, rock pieces, rock types, cracks, fissures, surfaces, fractures, filler, place. It’s a stone wall. I see not so much “essence” as the fleeting sense of the whole thing.

From beginning to end, I had the feeling that I was noticing each thing for the first time.  Shape, texture, relief, light, associate into visual clues into perception, into posture (movement) into character, into personality. Toward the end I was looking at heads were mysterious, maybe ancient, because their personality had been lost to time.

 

Untitled female figure, 1957, Hans Josephsohn Photo © Katalin Deér, Josephsohn Estate

 

If it’s hard to find a single adjective to define the work, it’s even more difficult describe the feeling that Hans Josephsohn and the experience of his work inspire in me.

Born in Konigsberg in 1920, Josephsohn died in Zurich in 2012.  As a Jew in post-1933 Germany, the boy was refused entry to his local art school. In 1938, he got a scholarship to study in Florence. He arrived just in time to be expelled under Mussolini’s Leggi Razziali. Fleeing to Switzerland, he found a friend in sculptor Otto Müller (1905-1993) before he was interned at the start of the world war in 1939. Josephsohn began working again in 1943. In a film about him and his work, he remarks that he has never visited Auschwitz, where his family was presumably murdered as he began his career; he was afraid a memorial might distract attention from them.

Although this is the first Josephsohn exhibition in France (and perhaps in Europe outside of Switzerland), the contemporary artist and culture activist Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964) featured certain of Josephsohn’s sculptures in Third Mind, a 2007 group show of contemporary artists at Palais de Tokyo. Rondinone wanted to build a heritage frame for the younger generation he was featuring.

From all this, my feeling creates Josephsohn as a created artist’s elder artist, genius honored by posthumous recognition rather than cold cash and a coffee. Josephsohn was sandwiched into the helpless tragedy of human existence both by natural routine,

 

Hans Josephsohn, 2004.Photo © Katalin Deér, Kesselhaus Josephsohn

 

Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Worse on Friday, 
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
Poor Solomon Grundy

… and a need to work and work and work, some work to keep thought at bay, some work to get the expression of vision just right. Like Emily Dickinson,

There's a certain Slant of light,

Winter Afternoons –

That oppresses, like the Heft

Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –

We can find no scar,

But internal difference –

Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –

'Tis the seal Despair –

An imperial affliction

Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –

Shadows – hold their breath –

When it goes, 'tis like the Distance

On the look of Death –

________

Properly called “Josephsohn vu par Albert Oehlen”, the life-time retrospective is part of a triptych exhibition called “Les artistes à l’épreuve de l’histoire - l’Age atomique/Josephsohn - Reanimation Paintings: A Thousand Voices”: a museum-wide sweep of history, high art and contemporary inclusion culture. It runs through 16 February 2025 at Musée de l’art modern de Paris.

"Grande Mess" & "Le Sacre du Sucre" harness history to sense and beauty in Guadeloupe’s past and present [By Tracy Danison]

“Grande Mess” by Clémence Baubant. Photo © Service communication Artchipel Scène Nationale de la Guadeloupe

The dance performance Grande Mess by Clémence Baubant starts with three young woman dance performers of color from Guadeloupe standing front of stage, left. Grande Mess, local French for “high mass”, the choreographers say, does not reference the Christian ritual. The performers wear black molding leotards, are in among two unequally-high white pedestals, like high steps; they stand on the blocks, stretch and gesture elegantly, drape themselves in the air, show themselves off, fun each other; there’s drum music in the distance. When they move off, I notice there are long, braided cords slung over their athletic shoulders.

Sugar island, dark skin, auction blocks, braided cords, showing themselves off. Why, that must be. Slave sale, with bullwhip.

Of course!

However, when the women have sashayed to the center stage and segued into costumes of white panties over black leotard with banana leaf halters and the far off music has become whole-stage present, the slave market story doesn’t make much sense.

With my casual racism out of the way as well as taken into consideration in terms of my reflections, in my experience of Clémence Baubant’s (and Lenablou’s) pieces, I think I’ve discovered something I had never thought about. It never occurred to me to imagine a body schema not centered around itself but rather from a point of contact in movement space. It seems to me that in Grande Mess, the three women’s dance begins at the soles of their feet, at the contact point with the ground, not, or at least it has seems to me, from the first or, root, chakra – as for instance you see in Martha Graham’s dance technique. As they progress through Grande Mess, the performers, Clémence Baubant, Naomi Yengadessin and Lisa Ponin, do not so much balance their bodies as shape them in the air, as if dancing a reflexology foot chart.

 

“Grande Mess” by Clémence Baubant. Photo © Artchipel

 

In experience, though, Grande Mess makes a unique demonstration of dance feeling. There is no mention of a particular technique or of dance feeling in the Grande Mess notes. However, the notes do declare the intention to explore the intimate relation of the body to walking while recalling (chthonic) figures such as  such Ladjablès (“La Diablesse”) a Wild Woman, who re-balances the man-woman relationship gone to whack, or Mûlatresse Solitude(“Mulatta Solitude”), a real-life “mixed-race” anti-slavery leader turned Guadeloupe origin myth.

All this of suggests to me “point of contact” and fusion, rather than “center” as technical approach. Indeed, Baubant’s choreography fuses different movements into a body’s natural rhythm. As I watch, I see shades of traditional dancing from Africa with maybe even a jig from Europe with break attitude with Rock&Roll exuberance with line-dance execution with ballroom kaleidoscoping with personal expressionism with … I don’t know what-all! This is not to say, Grande Mess is potpourri de danse bouncing here and there: Grande Mess is all vertical motion, ether-wards, rippling up out of the Earth and pulsing through the air.

 

“Le Sacre du Sucre” by Lenablou. Photo © Ernesto S. Mandap

 

I felt the “point of contact/soles of the feet/vertical motion” theme as equally present in the second piece of the evening’s double bill, Le Sacre du Sucre (“The Rite of Sugar”), featuring the celebrated Guadeloupe dance performer and choreographer, Lenablou (or Léna Blou). Again, the notes make no mention of a particular approach, but explain that Le Sacre du Sucre is in the tradition of GwoKa, a dance practice that uses call and response and Ka-drum rhythms to initiate then shape a “spontaneous” dance. It strikes me that the premise is “The waters are not divided, so make the world”.

Le Sacre du Sucre, the notes declare, means to bring spectators into a story that is rooted, on the one hand, in the de-humanization of the body that historical slavery requires, on the other hand, in the unexpected, the unlikely and the unforeseeable in that same history.

As experience, Le Sacre du Sucre works out as an origin story. The question is: how does music exist? The answer is: contact with the world around and its rhythms.

The piece opens with what I think of as a dance floor in a poor, hot, country café.  Two men, one woman. Drum sound in the wind, but no music. Too poor a place, I reckon, for a Victrola record player; must be a ménage à trois in the vein of Porgy & Bess, maybe Frankie & Johnny. Lenablou and her two men begin rough, awkward, slow. I think, like a couple dealing with an interloper who is by no means a third wheel.

 

“Le Sacre du Sucre” by Lenablou. Photo © Alexandre Boissot

 

And here is where it turns from a chronology to an ontology: all three are such practiced performers, their awkwardness also hints of them as guests at a party thrown by people who are new to them. This is not after all a story of what happens but of taking shape.

The drum sound takes on rhythm as the three continue together, are there, become practiced, letting in the sound of the world around through contact with their little space and with each other, by creating…  The performers, Lenablou, Félix Flauzin and Allan Blou don’t just pick up the sound, they find it in the world around.

The men begin to rhythm the poor tables as if they were drums, bringing in effect what is distant near… With feet on the ground and hands searching the air, Lenablou makes their rhythm into dance, into a place where she can be together … They put on “sound shoes” (designed by performer Félix Flauzin). These transform the point of contact with the earth to music with their movement.  

By the time the performers are taking their bows, they have defined themselves as individuals synching and falling out of synch, that is, they have gone from movement to rhythm, to dance to music …

Lenablou shows creation: it is a dance we all do.

_________

I saw “Grande Mess” and “Le Sacre du Sucre” at Carreau du Temple 10 October 2024.

“Grande Mess” is a creation of Clémence Baubant, with performance by her, Naomi Yengadessin and Lisa Ponin; dramaturgy by Mathilde Rance; scenographic creation by Anais Verspan; sound by Yannick Berbié; light by Marion Jouhanneau. Click for more on Clémence Baubant.

“Le Sacre du Sucre” is a creation of Lenablou (also written Léna Blou) with performance by her, Félix Flauzin and Allan Blou, assisted by James Carles; with music directed by Daniel Trépy; sound by Steeve Lancastre; and sound accessories by Félix Flauzin; light by Roger Olivier. Click for more on Lenablou.

Alexandra Lacroix’s “Entre nous, les saisons”: How to perform climate catastrophe [By Tracy Danison]

“Entre nous, les saisons” by Alexandra Lacroix. Photo: © Raphael Creton

I was Googling an equivalent for du lard du cochon and ran across the factoid that, before the 18th century, there were two seasons.

From about 4000 BC until then, annual events worth remarking bore holy names such as Saint Répétition or quaint ones such as Awakening of the Groundhog in the different dead languages.

Great, mysterious things then began to happen. Going on into the 18th century, believing firmly that making stuff was understanding it, and sure that anyhow it could all be reconciled to Biblical accounts, people started hairsplitting scientifically. Thus encouraged, taxonomy (phylum, order, genus, species) and industry began to proliferate.

Antonio Vivaldi was in 1723 thereby enabled to add Spring and Fall to our calendar and compose his celebrated Four Seasons concerti. Scrapping the wordy “let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth” his wonderful Seasons formalize a compact and gorgeous “natural world”, which, pretty much, exists to provide the lake and lightning that will henceforth inspire all aspiring Mary Shelleys and their shitty little boyfriends to write their own Frankensteins.

The inconvenience of another take on the world was documented in Best American Poetry/Beyond Words in late Summer, 2019: Sweltering in Paris: Going to ground with Michel Onfray, Greta Thunberg & the death of Descartes.The “natural world” is as difficult to intellectually and morally shake off as its wordier predecessor. And, so much the worse for humanity, it is increasingly more difficult to maintain Nature at anything like service-optimal levels.

 

“Entre nous, les saisons” by Alexandra Lacroix. Photo: © Raphael Creton

 

Alexandra Lacroix’s dance performance, Entre nous, les saisons (“Between you and me, the seasons”), imagines “the fragility of [human] being” (in the environment) not as an alternative to the beguiling notion of a world all our own but as a more perceptive and sensible way of looking at it: Fragility is U. As a description of material peril and of the human role, “fragility” does a better job of highlighting humanity’s situation in the natural world than “(inter)dependent” and a far better job than “should be responsible”, that’s for sure.

The brilliant part of Alexandra Lacroix’s show is that she knows fragility is about showing and talk always gets to “should”: more do, less words.

The theater is a big hall, a concrete floor, bleacher-bucket seating; the stage is the space between the first row and the wall. To churn up a fragile ambiance, she uses musicians riffing on the Four Seasons with electronic and traditional instruments, amateur rock climbers, and scaffolding. The set is complemented with familiar images of the leafy and green and spectacular natural world projected through the scaffolding and on the back wall and sometimes accompanied by little NPR-tone talking.

The rest is metaphor, symbol, allegory, analogy, what have you.

The climbers clamber and fall and grunt and sweat up around and over scaffolds that give the impression of being stocked on, rather than part of, the set. A couple of the musicians, loosely centered among the scaffold struts and beams try out riffs and phrases and variations on the Seasons concerti. The climbers, singular and together, are absorbed in talk of choices, defeats and successes.

 

“Entre nous, les saisons” by Alexandra Lacroix. Photo: © Raphael Creton

 

In terms of the rhythm and pace of movement and interaction, sometimes the climbers seem to lead the musicians, sometimes to follow them, sometimes musicians or climbers use the set environment as a sound board or an instrument or a challenge. Seasons is an actor: the concerti have shared History but also personal intimacy – I have stared out the window at the frozen Earth to the rattle of steam heat and Spring. The riffs and phrases and variations bounce against my expectations of Vivaldi, not those I have for the musicians.

In sum, as fragility-awareness training, Lacroix’s piece works really well. I was absorbed into its gentle (very subtly organized) chaos – trying to identify riffs on Vivaldi and mostly failing, for instance; the gentle chaos gently unsettles me, makes me feel my vulnerability, without scaring me. Fear’s an important factor. Low dramatic tension means low resistance to what’s happening. Maybe  

my sense of vulnerability implies that the world around can and does act on and without me; it has agency.

Fragility of being, Entre nous les saisons’ gentle chaos suggests, is about me, not about the meanness of the hard hard world. And, when it’s all said and done, what’s about me is about you.

_______

I saw “Entre nous, les saisons” at Théatre de l’Aquarium, 18 September 2024, directed by Alexandra Lacroix assisted by Raphaëlle Blin, with musicians from l’Ensemble Le Printans et climber/performers
Oscar Villamizar Rueda, Sarah Rochereau, Aymeric Schultze. Sound by Jérôme Baillet, video by Jérémie Bernaert
and set by Fanny Laplane
with assistance from Laura Bauchet.

Tarsila do Amaral: breaking out from Woman Invisibility [By Tracy Danison]

"A Cuca, 1924”. Photo © Ville de Grenoble - Musée de Grenoble. Photo: J.L. Lacroix

Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973), whose work is on show at the Musée du Luxembourg until February 2025, is a painterly personality of special vision and real skill. Were she a man, she would by this time be eponymous for a genre, like Magritte or Braque. I say that flatly, with a cowboy hat and boots, bold and belligerent. Through a series of quirks of family life and 20^th century politics, a sufficient oeuvre of a truly original (woman) painter has managed to survive the Woman Invisibility (Best American Poetry/Beyond Words 25/5/2023) process.

The bulk of the work in the exhibition, about 150 pieces, mostly dates from do Amaral’s mid-30s to late-40s and includes works such as Auto-retrato (Manteau rouge) 1923, A Negra, 1923 or A Cuca, 1924 that have been appreciated, but outside an oeuvre.

“Academia n°4, 1922”. Photo © Romulo Fialdini

Tarsila do Amaral’s painterly skill and particular ability to project a personal vision is patent the moment you walk into the exhibition. To the left, sure lines of Academia n°4, 1922 put an “academic” nude into sublime motion. To the right, a top-prize exercise of the expressionist-cubist-surrealist environment she’s working in.

"Caipirinha, 1923". Photo © Ding Musa

A bit further on, I am especially touched by portraits of herself and her second husband, Oswald de Andrade. 

Do Amaral's portrait, Auto-retrato I (Self-portrait 1), 1924, composed photo-realistically, has an indefinable but unmistakable trace of tough brushed into it. 

“Auto-retrato I, 1924”. Photo © Artistic-Cultural Collection of the Governmental Palaces of the State of São Paulo. Photo: Romulo Fialdini

Oswald’s portrait, Retrato de Oswald de Andrade, 1923, photo-realistic under an expressionist composition, layers in tender. I say “tough”, “tender” trying to convey the idea that do Amaral fuses in a sensibility rather than a feeling or a label: angry, easy, butch, femme.

“Retrato de Oswald de Andrade, 1923”. Photo © Acervo Museu de Arte Brasileira – MAB FAAP, São Paulo. Photo: Fernando Silveira

Other faces show this same kind of subtle fusion of sensibility into the composition. I am thinking of the foregrounded face of a worker in a rice field in “Trabalhadores, 1938”. I say to myself, working for peanuts in water up to his knees to support a large family, not, Despair. Despair is too broad and too narrow for what do Amaral draws my attention to.

 

Trabalhadores, 1938”. Photo © MASP

Many if not most paintings that caught my attention are composed of well-defined, brightly-colored shapes and forms that are arranged in, often enough, dreamy-versions of otherwise typical scenes – garden, street, figure in a (desert) landscape, for instance.

"Floresta,1929". Photo © Museu de Arte Contemporânea da USP Collection, São Paulo, Brazil. Photo Romulo Fialdini

These compositions engage me on two levels. On the first level the elements compose a narrative, conjure a visual place. The narrative is structured to point a parallel second level of engagement where all the different elements of the first exist independently, in un-narrative space.

“Distância, 1928”. Photo © Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo. Photo: Isabella Matheus

Though it’s a first impression, it seems to me that this quality of pointing from element of composition to thing for itself, from place to space, distinguishes do Amaral from the scrum and ruck of the approaches in her time, especially Cubist or Surrealist work.

“O Touro, 1928”. Photo © Romulo Fialdini

It seems to me the colorful reductions and fabulous arrangements of, say, Picasso’s Cubism underline the narrative quality of composition. De Chirico’s or Magritte’s Surrealism or distortion of forms and de-familiarization tend to question the on-looker’s interpretation of visual narrative rather than assert the act of composition-imagination, as Tarsila do Amaral does.

 

"Passagem de nivel III, 1965". Photo © Jaime Acioli

The documentation makes a strong case for do Amaral as an actor on a broader artistic scene in Paris from the turn of the century into the 20-30s of the previous century. She situates, according to this, in a cultural climate where an interest in African and other indigenous arts give her permission to use her personal – but what they call “Brazilian” – experience in her own art.

“Carnaval em Madureira, 1924”. Photo © Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo. Photo: Isabella Matheus

Husband Oswald even wrote a pamphlet for do Amaral’s little group of Paris Brazilians proclaiming “cannibal art” – meaning that it is by “eating up” (absorbing) European painterly nous, the Brazilians, including do Amaral, create a syncretized, unique, “Brazilian” form of art.

 

"Porto I, 1953". Photo © MASP

So, building on her ability to depict her lived cultural environment in modern/European style, as a subject of art commentary, Tarsila exists as a “national Brazilian”. However, even if she did fit herself into this national identity story, I am not convinced by it.

“A Negra, 1923”. Photo: © Romulo Fialdini

Looking around, I just don’t think there is much of anything other than Tarsila do Amaral that is especially or exclusively “Brazilian” in her work. Otto Dix, who was from Germany and served in the German Imperial army and painted all those shocking World War 1 scenes from German trenches and German streets, is not classed as a “national German” painter but known rather as a particularly acute observer and Expressionist painter of war, like Goya.

 

"Terra,1943". Photo © Marcio Rangel

I say, let do Amaral be Tarsila and let’s let her paint her vision of her experience, wherever she acquired it. I say, she tagged herself as Brazilian because she could exist publicly in it, and, between her sex and her family and her society, there weren’t many places she could do that – the label protected her work from Woman Invisibility. That’s enough.

 

“Auto-retrato (Manteau rouge) 1923”. Photo © Museu Nacional de Belas Artes Ibram, Rio de Janeiro, Photo: Jaime Acioli

Tarsila do Amaral is an artist, a painter, a woman, a Brazilian for the whole world.

___________

Cecilia Braschi
is the curator of “Tarsila do Amaral: Peindre le Brésil moderne” at the Musée du Luxembourg until 2 February 2025. The show will move to the Guggenheim Bilbao for an exhibition that begins in February and lasts into June 2025. Tarsila do Amaral’s works previously figured in a 2018 solo exposition in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s Latin American painter series that featured Diego Rivera, Cândido Portinari, Roberto Matta, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Armando Reverón, José Clemente Orozco and Joaquín Torres García.

Sandrine Juglair and the real story behind snips, snails and puppy dog tails [By Tracy Danison]

DICKLOVE, dance performance by Sandrine Juglair. Photo © Aurélie Ruby

Roll over Judith Butler and tell Germaine Greer the news!

With her dance performance DICKLOVE, Sandrine Juglair, circus-trained choreographer and performer, in a little under an hour, performs all we know and all we need to know about performing gender. She entertains, to boot.

I’ve suspected it for a long time and Juglair’s performance confirmed it. Snips, snails and puppy dog tails are what make a boy. What makes a girl is mostly a boy in makeup through the cheap mirror of what a boy imagines as the perfect object of desire: sugar, spice and everything nice.

Somehow, before I saw it put into dance performance in DICKLOVE, I was still thinking gendering had a bit more to it than that. But, I realize, not. As with so many things that are a part of the ordinary routine of living, getting words around gendering takes so many words and so much time that one comes to think it must be complex: ex multiplicitate, profunditatem, from complexity, profundity.

Well-made dance performance such as Juglair’s gets a body beyond all the narrative bushwa.

DICKLOVE, dance performance by Sandrine Juglair. Photo © Aurélie Ruby

Just to state it out loud, the problem of gendering is in its consequences on individuals, not its signs. Its processes are just another story made up from tics and feints and so-called suspension of disbelief that put a gun to people’s heads according to exteriorized genitalia. The real reason critics of feminism claim the feints and tics are natural and observable is that understanding otherwise engages individual and social responsibility, all anathema to a real boy. Surely strutting and fretting a boy’s manly on his stage can be no vice!

As Juglair performs it, the key points of boy-ness or male gendered-ness or masculinity are broad at the shoulder, maybe a penis pouch, a certain crook to a leg that suggests a fighter’s crouch, tongue-tied-ness, a cigarette, brandished, a failure, an excuse, and a hero fantasy. All these cues and clichés are also found in Jimmy Dean’s Big Bad John(1961), the frisson of masculine heroism of which reminded me that to avoid unpleasant consequences, a boy bettermake the man or fake it well enough to pass. Not having been born in northern Ohio, Juglair has never heard Big Bad John. But, of course, like everybody else from everywhere, she has heard of it in some other, equally ubiquitous, and somehow unarguable, culture message. As a girl-kid budding athlete, she says, she instinctively let the boys win the races.

Juglair’s DICKLOVE got Karine and I talking about the ineffable appeal of Donald Trump. As unpleasant as that is, we also realized that “crouch-tongue-tied-ness-cigarette-brandished-failure-excuse-hero-fantasy” is meant to seduce the audience by exposing his, the Donald’s beating heart of boy-ness. To his followers, the threats, auto-exculpation and hero-fantasy that structure his speeches, feel right, are attractive, are catnip, to his followers.

 Indeed, the boy has made the man.

Juglair’s DICKLOVE is as fine a piece of performance as you’ll find.

______

We saw DICKLOVE by Juglair at Théâtre Silvia Monfort, Paris, on 3 October 2024, played by herself,  Sandrine Juglair, assisted by Claire Dosso, Aurélie Ruby, with costumes by Léa Gadbois-Lamer, sound by Lucas Barbier, lighting by Julie Méreau, assisted by Marie Roussel, set by Max Heraud, Etienne Charles and La Manufacture (Switzerland).

About dance performance and “faraway countries”: Lithuania [by Tracy Danison]

Edgy, personal: “When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone” by Vilma Pitrinaite. Photo © Patrick Berger

Esthetically, Atelier de Paris most often chooses the intriguing performance over the done thing. Participating in the country-wide Season of Lithuania (and keeping an oar in culture exchange with east Europe over the long term) – featuring not just dance and performance but also visual arts –  is doing the right thing. With its emphasis on un-narrative and immediate experience, intimacy and diversity of expression, dance performance is a powerful tool for cultural dialogue. 

Atelier featured two premières by creators Lukas Karvelis, She dreamt of being washed away to the coast and Vilma Pitrinaitė, When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, who have been in residence since last year. In addition, Atelier’s Open Studio conference featured WIP by choreographers Liza Baliasnaja, Greta Grinevičiūtė and Agnietė Lisčkinaitė, all active on the Lithuanian dance performance scene. 

Taken together, I couldn’t detect anything specifically “Lithuanian” about the work of these artists. But then, I think “nation” is a political framework built higgledy-piggledy around a human networking tic, something like the one that makes for that famous six degrees of separation or simultaneous language change and learning in widely separated groups. 

As individuals, then, all five, it seems to me, are focused on the now and future of dance performance and society generally. Even more perhaps than in France these days, “identity” suggests individual, not “national”, identity; “diversity” suggests gender and LGBTQ+ inclusion more than “culture” diversity.

For instance, both She dreamt of being washed away to the coast, which according to the play notes, references a national folktale, and When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, which references the Ukraine liberation struggle, suggest an intersection of national and personal identities. But performance experience drives the reference out of mind. Karvelis’ piece is an absolutely absorbing performer tour de force of leg-work and balance. Pitrinaitė’s is pure contemporary danse d’auteur: edgy, emotional… personal, personifying. 

Presenting a new performance titled Chiaroscuro, on the social dynamics of fear, only Liza Baliasnaja’s biography – she has a Jewish heritage from parents who came from Russia to Lithuania at some point in the post-war period – suggests issues of national identity and belonging or historical trauma. Her broader issue is to explore how history, politics and social conditions shape contemporary identity; that certainly has resonance everywhere in the world, not just in her neck of the woods. 

Baliasnaja is currently working on the “shield/protector” aspect of a “victim-shield/protector-victimizer” nexus for multi-part choreography. Though she may be referencing Lithuania’s history, her concept applies pretty neatly to recent American experience of populist grievance movements and I expect the piece is meant to have a more or less universal application. Otherwise, Baliasnaja is an ardent promoter of her country’s contemporary dance scene, complete with the Europe and international connections the Season of Lithuania is looking to strengthen: she’s an alumna of Theresa de Keersmaeker’s P.A.R.T.S dance performance school and currently works from Cologne, Germany.

 

Hands-in-pocket performance: “She dreamt of being washed away to the coast” by Lukas-Karvelis. Photo © Svelniau

Describing herself as an independent contemporary dance performer and choreographer, and certainly very Lithuania-centered in education and work,  Agnietė Lisčkinaitė co-founded her BE COMPANY dance group with Greta Grinevičiūtė, a long-time friend and frequent work partner, also much present on the Lithuanian scene. Lisčkinaitė has been president of the Lithuania Contemporary Dance Association since 2020 and performs with the AIROS and Vilnius City Dance Theatre LOW AIR dance theaters. She is perhaps the most issues-oriented of the group, throwing herself into the local movements for gender and LGBTQ+ equality and democratic resistance in Belarus. 

Still, I would like to say that Lisčkinaitė’s concerns are extensions of her focus on dance performance rather than the other way around. From first to last her remarks had body movement and use at its core; at one point she asked us to reflect on how raising the arms affected our bodies and later asked if we had observed how often “arms-high” (or “hands-in-the-air”) figures in protest? 

Lisčkinaitė is performing Hands Up! at Théâtre de la Ville, ruminating the space between surrender and resistance in the same gesture and using it as a platform to ask how we should view protest: symbolic aggression or symbolic liberty?

The general universalist perspective of these artists, I think, finds its clearest expression in Greta Grinevičiūtė, who has a very ingenious approach to the experience and observation of the things of her immediate environment. 

As already noted, Grinevičiūtė’s very active on the Lithuanian dance performance scene: in addition to co-founding BE COMPANY troupe with Agnietė Lisčkinaitė, she produces contemporary dance and interdisciplinary performance, notably, with Vytis Jankauskas Dance Company and the AIROS theater and she’s one of a collective of active creators at Vilnius City Theatre Art and Science Laboratory. Her WIP, which stretches back to 2018, explores the construction of memory (both experiential and genetic/generational) in her work, which consists of a human object/subject (such as a “parent”) and an (associated? transitional?) object from ordinary life.

Dance for a washing machine and a mother, produced at the Vilnius Art and Science Laboratory in 2020, is the second part of a (so far) four-part project which began with Dance for a vacuum cleaner and a father and will include currently WIP-pieces  “Dance for and object and child” and “Dance for a cigarette and best friend”. Each piece envisions the sense and role of object/subject and object in “memory”. I suppose Grinevičiūtė should have got me thinking about a dance performer, but, instead, she got me thinking about musician Frank Zappa, his mix of erudite and ordinary and his interest in Erik Satie*: how does music fit into life, into the fabric of modern life? Zappa was one of those individuals who, by being themself, somehow represents everybody else. So is Greta Grinevičiūtė. 

 

Phia Ménard: a magus sharing more than magic [By Tracy Danison]

“L'après-midi d'un foehn Version 1” by Phia Ménard - Cie Non Nova. Photo © Jean-Luc Beaujault

 

Little kids to the left of me, little kids to the right of me, little kids in front of me. In the unusual heat and humidity, Phia Ménard’s dressed in a heavy overcoat, wool cap and boots to my tee-shirt, cotton pants and practically new deck shoes. She’s fooling with a plastic sack. Not five minutes into her performance L'Après-midi d'un foehn Version 1, I am still as a mouse. Enchanted, just like the little kids.

Choreographer and performer Phia Ménard’s Après-midi Version 1 (the one made for kids – when I asked my friend Wang what the adult version was like, he took an ominous air and said, “Darker.”) was part of the Lafayette Anticipations’ annual Echelle Humaine dance performance program, billed in 2024 as a celebration of “artists and works at the frontiers of the imaginary and the real, of the tangible and intangible” … including, along with Phia Ménard’s and other performances, Delila Belaza’s Figures, testing out the possibility of a “universal rite” and Catol Teixeira’s La Peau entre les doigts (“The skin between the fingers”), dancing “an imaginary traditional dance sans origine ni territoirelinking the present to eternity”. I have to love it.  

It came to me that Phia Ménard, whom I’ve seen more than once before with pleasure, is a “faiseur” –  a “maker”. The French word has for me a connotation of magic without illusion, action that plucks an unnoticed reality out of ambient potential. So, ‘though there’s really nothing to choose between a magus and cheap jack magician, Phia Ménard is to me the former, not the latter.

In way of a doing successful performance, Ménard’s magus raised in me an un-remembered memory.

 

“L'après-midi d'un foehn Version 1” by Phia Ménard - Cie Non Nova. Photo © Jean-Luc Beaujault

 

I have come into the dusty square of a tiny town in the woods. Scrunched against a pile of kindling is rabbi Ber, a barrel of a hirsute man. He’s amusing a little jumble of scrawny brats. With each lazy snap of big man’s thick finger against the belly of his thumb, a grey dove flicks, surprised then frantically flapping, into the bright air.

The kids ignore the doves.

Instead, as they would a map, they study the rabbi’s face. They know it’s a squint of mind, not magic, that makes miracles, so they study his smirk and squint. They want to find their way from there to the peculiar regard that lets the good Ber see doves on a roost where they now see only empty air. They want only to snap their fingers for unseen things to come to be.

That’s why “faiseur” came to mind: Phia Ménard has just rabbi Ber’s peculiar regard. I am following it as, kneeling at the top of a circle of floor fans, she pulls a pair of scissors from inside her coat, and slowly, carefully, cuts a pattern of a dolly in a little plastic bag. She slips the scissors back in her coat, and taking the whole room in her regard, rises and walks slowly around behind the fans, turning them all on, seeming to exercise great care.

When the final fan is running, she sits back in her place and patiently watches the plastic bag take shape and live, first in the music – L’Aprés midi d’un foehn does reference Débussy’s breathy prelude involving a faun –  then with the vitalized air. It’s an old trick, but in her regard it’s all new. She grows a crowd, who, it seems, solo, couples, trios, a ballet, take their cues the ones from the others, twirling and diving…

And they tire. Some drop out, looking for the bar, perhaps, or seeking a tryst. Then more and more begin to go, fall to the ground. And when its just the right number, just as the true god would, Phia Ménard’s regard reaches out her hands to tear them to shreds.

We know it’s all not true and none of us, kids or adults, has suspended belief, been hypnotized or tricked. We’ve just joined her regard for a bit. And we like it.

Now everybody knows Phia Ménard’s secret.

Rockets, space, place, sets and the power of theater: Jeanne Candel’s “Fusées” [By Tracy Danison]

"Fusées", theater performance by Jeanne Candel. Photo © JeanLouisFernandez

Six pm on a crisp and sunny-enough Fall Saturday at Théâtre de l’Aquarium in the bois de Vincennes, drinks and snacks abounding. We’re seeing Fusées (“Rockets”) by Jeanne Candel.

The house is full, crowded even.

Fusées is inspired by a 1995 documentary by Andrei Ujică called Out of the Present, the story of Sergei Krivalev’s the events surrounding an unplanned and near fatal 300-day stay on the Mir space station in 1991-92. Candel strands two guys, Kyril and Boris, in a rocket ship.

Looking around, Karine remarks that there are some kids, but not so many as you’d expect for a thing about rockets.

She nudges me, Aren’t stories about rockets for kids?

I usually take it that a performance for spectators ranging from the age of reason to the age of despair – not just kids – will be at least coherent. The “from 6 years old” on the Fusées blurb had puzzled me. I tell Karine I double checked to make sure that it wasn’t part of a children’s program.

The blurb, the rockets kept me wondering, though. Are there so many theater performances figuring rocket ships for kids under six? Are there so few plays for people over six set in rocket ships? After all, performance, even the old hoary talky classic plays I was trained up with, tend to be topical. Doesn’t daily mention of rockets for each day of the nearly 70 years now that I’ve been too chicken my quietus to make make rockets eminently topical?

 

"Fusées", theater performance by Jeanne Candel. Photo © JeanLouisFernandez

Apparently, not.

A quick internet search shows that, no, there are no or virtually no theater performances set in a rocket ship and dealing with the realities and concerns likely appertaining to and generated by the typical environment thereof.

In the same way as Yorick’s skull is a conversation piece to the great quietus, rocket ships are launch pads for adventure and escape. Death happens in Elsinore castle and adventure and escape in Imagination; when it comes down to it, there are very few theatrical places in proportion to the places in which human experience happens; it strikes me that throne rooms are common-enough sets in contemporary theater performance and film.

That seems odd to me and as my psychoanalyst used to say, What’s odd is worth exploring. For instance, consider that, although the American Automobile Association estimates the average US person spends two hours a day, or 48 years of life, in their car – many of us even live, have lived or lived in a car – there are no or virtually no theater performances set in a car.

How does car space shape expression and why can’t Yorick’s skull figure on the dashboard? Anyhow, come to think of it, it’s hard to imagine a set that more perfectly represents the shape of contemporary life than a place where I’m constantly in danger of wheeling into very nearby sharp objects and somebody, likely a complete asshole or a deus ex machina, controls my air hose.

 

"Fusées", theater performance by Jeanne Candel. Photo © JeanLouisFernandez

Anyhow, getting avid spectators wondering about space, place and set, is only the first good thing Candel’s Fusées does.

It entertains you, rolls out classic-contemporary-performance-like, dramatic but non-traumatizing, invites rather than drags a spectator in to enjoy a mix of the old and new theatrical gesture and prop on a stage that is a rocket ship:

People moving a topless box piano and a big thing under a blue plastified tarp.

The big thing under the blue tarp reveals as a rather small, vaguely antique Punch & Judy-style puppet stage.

The four cast members, each bearing casts and bandages witness to the spurns and whips of danger and adventure [involved in riding rockets] and assisted in their stories by such plastic hand props as a commercially available Mister Sun, use the little (and now crowded) stage to explain the origins of the world. Matters touched upon include black hole theory and the Big Bang along with the longings of the wild beasts to get on up and out into the vast Nothing-something.

Segue to the rocket, riders oppressed by induced gravity before forced to sort of moonwalk, which one will be doing from now on in rocket ships because there’s zero gravity. O! What terrible lightness of being on a rocket ship!

 

"Fusées", theater performance by Jeanne Candel. Photo © JeanLouisFernandez

Cosmonaut Kyril is of course, nervous, taciturn to cosmonaut Boris’ cheerful, helpful.

Boris does the rocket’s whooshing and handles the passive-aggressive Q&A, ground control’s tergiversation and a competent and, therefore, sinister, AI, a self-modulating Whirr 45-89 Series, I believe. Boris of course beats the AI by tapping fast into a keyboard; the rocket ship gets moving.

They get someplace. As we all will.

Kyril disappears into a fold in space. Boris discovers a whole new universe. To paraphrase Ry Cooder, that’s just how things go on a rocket ship. Or so I’ve been invited to gaily imagine.

In addition to entertaining, with all this skill and noos, Candel manages to, as she says she intends to, “… Mime advanced technology, re-play the conquest of space with stage props and music… mak[e] an allegory of the indomitability of theatrical art, of its craft and of its space… The theater… in spite of difficulties, fragilities… even wobbling on a tightrope, is powerful stuff.

Fusées is theatrical performance at its best.

__________________

I saw “Fusées” at Théâtre de l’Aquarium, 14 September 2024 with Vladislav Galard, Sarah Le Picard, Jan Peters and Claudine Simon as cast. Théatre de l’Aquarium has been operated by the cie La vie brève and co-managed by Jeanne Candel, S. Achache, Marion Bois and Elaine Méric since July 2019. The theater has as thematic the entanglement of music and theater. Jeanne Candel also works with the Opéra Comique, Paris.

Out of the woods and into… a thicket of dance performance creation [By Tracy Danison]

œ-matiere, an immersive choreography by Pierre Pontvianne. Photo © cieparc

Summer’s over. Atelier de Paris just sent me a "Tour d’horizon” of its Fall 2024 dance performance offer: 100% new creation and pretty much a compendium of what’s up in contemporary dance and performance.

The wide play and density of the offer reminds me that the challenge of appreciating dance performance is accepting the premise(s). Accepting premises isn’t suspending disbelief and doesn’t involve so much mindfulness, a skill, as patience, a virtue.

Virtue is better than skill. While virtue holds the inner monkey at bay, skill just polishes the brute’s shines. Mindfulness is directive, acquisitive, good for business and war. Patience resists the impulse to make everything one’s own, assign it a cause, imagine its effects, tag it and put a price on it.

Part of the goodness in dance performance generally is certainly the opportunity it affords to practice virtue. Patience in dance-performance spectating, for instance, in addition to resisting the inner monkey, may often require raking up the courage to resist outer monkeys, too. Remember when the Wicked Witch of the West tosses a ball of fire at Scarecrow, cackling, “Want to play a little ball, Straw Man”? Scarecrow flinches, sure, but they hang on to the end of a tale that says so much more about American life than Scarecrow could have ever learned at school. Attaboy, Scarecrow!

As a fact, Atelier de Paris opens its creative rentrée with a street-lawn party combo that, as well as patience, fêtes community and commitment: the completion of choreographer Joanna Leighton’s Cycle des Veilleurs (“Cycle of Watchers”) #2 in the 12^th arrondissement. As with her other Veilleur events, for each of the 365 days in the year, a local-area resident has volunteered an hour to watch at sundown or sunset from an “object-shelter” (designed by architect Benjamin Tovo) and set up on a high point in the area. That’s it, Veilleurs just watch, not watch out nor watch for, nor watch out for, just watch.

She dreamt of being washed away to the coast, a choreography around a Lithuanian folktale by Lukas Karvelis. Photo © Svelniau

Leighton, who put together the notable People United (which premiered at Atelier de Paris in 2021) has a flair for identifying the essential in an idea and choreographing involvement with it. The Veilleurs party starts with a potential base of 730 fêtards walking in loose parade from Place du Cadran Solaire Papillon to the Atelier at the Cartoucherie in the Bois de Vincennes, where a picnic with post-prandial memory-share is planned.

It seems a good plan to jump from the Veilleurs to the new performances, which begin with a spot light on Lithuania. Lukas Karvelis’ solo piece She dreamt of being washed away to the coast recalls a popular folktale while Vilma Pitrinaitė’s When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, a performance around the repercussions of the Ukraine war in the post-colonial Baltic.

Myriam Gourfink does Rêche (“Raw”), a choreography for seven based on yoga breathing techniques. Pierre Pontvianne,about whose Motifs I’ve previously written here, presents Kernel-matières, an introduction to dance performance gesture and part of a seven-part piece called oe matière, meant as an immersive effort to “bring alive the stuff of performance outside the set in order to feel it and share it in a different light”. Motifs is part of the oe septet.

Rêche, choreography integrating yoga breathing techniques by Myriam Gourfink. Photo © Laurent Paillier

With Japan-born performer Yuri Itabashi soloing the title, Maxime Kurvers, who focuses on dance anthropology, has put together an un-NÔ NÔ play au feminin called Okina (“Old Man”). Taken by the same impulse to re-contextualize, Aurélien Dougé’s Aux Lointains (“Distances”), feels out performance textured from observation of routine experience, in this case, New York and the high mountains of Switzerland and Japan.

Ruth Childs, choreographer-performer of Fantasia, an exceptional performance, returns to the Atelier with Fun Times,funnin’ out multiple layers of sense and experience in “fun”. Julie Gouju’s L’InesthétiqueManège (“Ugly Merry-go-round”), uses expressive dance not so much to flesh out meaning but give flesh to a specifically teenage emotion-feeling-reception model.

Current issues find their place, too. Tiran Willemse, Marine Colard, Ikram Benchrif and Paul Girard have come up with what you might call “docu-performance” pieces. Willemse’s blackmilk deconstructs gender, constructs queer and ponders the sadness in the black male heart. Benchrif & Girard’s Nichoir 93 multimedia performance asks How many charitable gestures make a home? And finally, Marine Colard, who wrote and performed Tir sacré, a successful send-off on sports commentary, takes a look at oratory as an art with Bataille Générale.

Report on “Song of Self” and “Black Nail - Exorcism of Vladimir Putin” performance, Kyiv [By Tracy Danison]

Looking east across the summer theater stage, Syretsky Park, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024, 5:54 a.m. Photo © Tracy Danison

The morning of 15 August, the feast of the Assumption (of the mother to the father and son), at dawn, in the summer theater of Syretsky Park in Kyiv, Ukraine, I performed my Song of Self and Black Nail - Exorcism of Vladimir Putin.

The video is on my YouTube channel @TracyDanison beginning 24 August but you can also find it now on Instagram or Facebook. The written version of the poems figures below. Thanks for sharing Song and the Exorcism. Thanks for doing a Song of Self yourself. As for an exorcism, I can think of more than one – How does Sting put it? – “priest, poet or politician” that might benefit from an exorcism, can’t you?

The video recording is only a memento to an act of Real Presence, an artefact of a moment or place created in space and time by my performance and recorded by an imperfect technology. 

In an effort to get as much self into the words as possible, I used rapidity and hoped for spontaneity, hoped to give a glimpse of my a-temporal, a-spatial, existence-making, entanglement with Other, ideas and things: I wrote the poems, printed them and put them in my pocket.

Many tropes and words from poets and writers and thinkers I love fell into place as I tried to put my intentions on paper, so I put them in, just like that. For Black Nail, the poem that initiates the (1975) movie Seven Beauties by Lina Wertmüller, summed up for me pretty well that truth is irony. I was then quite distressed to learn of it:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

And, in those days, reading Germinal excited me so, I had to jump up and pace around every couple pages. I’ve realized since that nothing signifies something beyond words.

Oh, yeah.

Mirror field audio visual installation with television tower just behind. Babi Yar memorial site, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024. Photo © Tracy Danison

The evening I was writing Song of Self and Black Nail, the evening before I was to begin my train trip to Kyiv, my son, now partnered and a father himself, told me he’s been diagnosed with the same psychic disorder I had to put up with until recently.

He’s getting medicine for it, though.

And with that, I am consoled – thanks to time and the experience and the well-marinated thoughts and ideas contributed to me by Lina Wertmüller, Adrienne Rich, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Allen Ginsberg, Wallace Stevens and Shakespeare, among others too numerous to thank.

He told me just last night that he was going through a whole day feeling well: “Dad, I think it’s working”, he said.

Reading what are essentially drafts from printouts, I performed Song and recited Black Nail once, without rehearsal or revisions.

In the evening after my performance, there was a drone and missile attack on Kyiv.

There is a very big and important television tower in among the woods not too far off where I was staying. I saw a drone or some drones get shot out of the air, as it seemed, just outside the window. Maybe that tower was the target; there was, I am told, a hard fight for it during the battle for Kyiv. From what I saw, I think the defenders used some sort of Gatling gun against the drone/s. The building trembled when it/they exploded.

I conclude from this experience that, given that I got the proportion of toad’s tongue to virgin’s first menstrual blood correct, my Exorcism does not take immediate effect. 

I picked Syretsky Park at random, pointing a green space on the map when I got to Kyiv. Madame Google indicated it was within walking distance of where I was. The evening before I walked to the park to check it was open in early morning. The next day, I arrived at the park just before the break of day.

The Black Nail inside Moloch’s brain: Contemporary colorized photograph of a killing trench lodged in a shard of granite near the child memorial at the Babi Yar site, Kyiv, Ukraine, 15 August 2024. Photo © Tracy Danison

I noticed the summer theater where I performed when I walked through the park gate.

Before going there for my performance, I did not know that Syretsky Park was just across the street from the Babi Yar memorial or that the park was the site of a camp for various captives from 1942 until the end of German occupation or even that the place is part of the physical and moral topography of what we call “Babi Yar”.

I chose Kyiv for the Song of Self and Black Nail because the war against Ukraine has been made into a war against those who believe, as I do, that each person is a person, equal in fact to all other persons, no conditions, no exceptions.

The world begins where self begins, I believe.

It was coincidence that I found myself at the Babi Yar site. The television tower that might have been the target of the coming evening’s drone attack is located there. Off the paths, there are signs of deadly fracas and firing positions. 

The Babi Yar memorial is made up of reminders that the thousands murdered there were, in the locution of the poet and Fugs’ co-founder Ed Sanders, a human being, individuals, persons. Their voices whisper on the wind, rustle and sigh in the bushes and boughs of the trees. Literally. Never forget, never forgotten.

Stanczyk, court jester, broods on the victory of Moscow, by Jan Matejko (1838-93), Warsaw Museum of Art. Photo © Tracy Danison

As I was walking up through the park, avoiding a crowd of oblivious joggers and dog walkers, I had a vision. I don’t remember if I had read the description somewhere before or how the vision came to me.

It is of a guy standing over a little pile of not-quite-dead-enough human being and, with a submachine gun, shooting into the pile, an idiot spattering himself with flesh and bone, spreading superfluous terror and suffering. As he goes a-murdering from pile to pile, in his mind, this guy is obsessively scrolling “I am a German. I am a German. I am a German”.

This awful vision reminded me that Black Nail, murder-love, begins with how a person believes they exist.

These days, wherever you go, there is much encouragement for this sad guy’s belief that being part of some group or movement lets him exist. In some form or another, I’ll be trying to take Real Presence on the road and do some counter-encouraging, including in Ukraine, a lot of whose people are, thanks to the anguish of cultural discontinuity and war and the efforts of Putin and his allies to conjure Black Nail, teetering on the edge of “ethno-national” hysteria.

By the way. “Firstest with the mostest” and fastest to the rightest place, Ukraine is set to win, and soon, the war that the neither the Germans, nor Swedes, nor Turks could do, confining Russia to the north and bringing down its empire for keeps. Russia’s defeat will almost certainly generate Babi-Yar-shaped moral and practical consequences. Dread them.

________________________________

Song of Self

Waking as like from a fretful dream,

Here I am!

There are You!

Here I am!

I celebrate myself.

Still air, wind, cool, heat, light, dark.

I celebrate a blade of grass, the head of a dandelion

I celebrate a sharp green blade of grass,

I mourn the frowsy fragile head of a dandelion

Up down this that, heart side, mind side, before, behind, yonder

And soon. Past and Present. Future Perfect.

And what I assume, You assume too.
For every atom belonging to Me, the same belongs to You.

And not quite.

Mud shapes according to its water.

In light dust may beguile different. Yet.

Be, the finale of me,

You, the disciple of me!

Me, the disciple of you!

We, the apostle of You.

Smile or Spit. Up to you.

We want is finale of seem

We be Imperators of ice cream

Call the roller of big cigars,

Girls that dawdle in such dress.

Boys that whip, those muscular ones.

And who remains take that bedsheet

And spread it so as to cover the mouth that is dumb.

I celebrate Me.

There. There is there.

That is. There.

A swell in a wave and a speck in the dust.

Plus B + I + [ ~≠U/speck and wave]   

Makes here, where I and You are.

Thus, plus I + [ ~≠U], a place, a door.

Before the door we are there.

Gone through the door, we are here after.

To maintain attitudes, hold your position
To die bravely on yonder hill

And much should blind you,
Much must evade you.

All. At the cost of a bedsheet

And You left behind.

Breathe in. Breathe out

What a song to sing!

Birds and flight. Fish and swim,

Look and sky.

See and horizon.

A fine song!

Sing this song and never go home

Sing this song and everywhere is home

Sing this song and there’s no home

Take note before we sing

We cannot know where we’ll go

Only that I will wind up here with You.

Celebrate me.

• Tracy Danison/13 August 2024

 

Black nail

You. Minds of my generation.

Those who believe Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!

Russia. Listen. Vladimir. Listen.

Banqueted on sweet, sticky lies

Raise your eyes. Fine omens. Firefly signs.

Crackling Portents.

Curlicues of alchemical anatomy Nobody understands.

And Nobody was the fiction of a blind man. Now dead.

Those who believe Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!

Your bright eyes fixed everywhere but on the Other

You knot stories babbled by babies in blindfolds

Truth is plain to see but too hard to say.

So say something, anything.

Santa Claus, Kris Kringle, Saint Nick! A young man!

Lord, Christ Christmas, Beejesus! A young man!

Say it again! Say it again! And again.

To win is to succeed.

And to lose?

An inspiring late night movie

 

Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man! Listen.

Vladimir.  Listen Russia.

Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.

When will we end the human war?

 

Listen! You have it all!

The power of the kingdoms. Like Binyamin says.

The murder, the pain, the stink of the dead.

All the bewildered motherless bitches with the thousand yard stare.

Fast-firing cannons, rocket bombs

And jellied gasoline and rattling guns

Tiny drones like dragonflies hurling potato mashers.

Thrilling. Exciting. Powerful. Emotional

Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as a young man!

 

But. To succeed is not to win.

You have to win to win. Listen. Russia.

I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.

I still haven’t told you what you must to win winning.

I’m addressing you.

Those who believe.

Santa Claus is Jesus Christ as an old fella!

 

To win, you’ve got to love it.

The Murder, the pain, the horror, I mean

The Moloch stink in Vlad’s nostril.

Santa Claus is Jesus Christ as an old fella!

 

Fill your libraries full of tears.

Look at yourself through the grave

You’ve got to love the stink, I mean.

Santa Claus is Jesus as an old fella!

 

Those who want to believe. Listen

Russia. Those who want to take off your clothes.

Listen. There is a narrow sliver of steel, a black nail

Just here, at heart’s gate.

 

Embossed along the barbed rim:

“who love murder in their heart

Die.”

Russia when will you be an angel?

Vladimir wants to touch it,

Press on it a bit

As if you really were a prisoner

And it were only your limp prick.

 

Jesus Christ is Santa Claus as young man

Kris Kringle is Beejesus as an older guy

Christ Christmas is Saint Nick in drag

Thursday falls next Tuesday

Russia. How can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?

 

Russia, Vladimir is quite serious.

This is the impression I get from looking in the television set.   

Russia is this correct? Are you naked?

Is your prick limp ?

Quick. Reach out. Take my hand

Or die.

 

You have been told.

• Tracy Danison/13 August 2024

Real Presence in Kyiv 15 August 2024: for Equality, Freedom, Solidarity [By Tracy Danison]

Lounging, big as a hog, heavier than sin, and with the fatal primus stove, the cat called “Behemoth” from Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita” on the porch of the house in old-town Kyiv where the author is said to have worked on it between 1928 and his death in 1940. Photo © Paul Tracy Danison

The negative reaction of certain friends – certain others have been supportive or neutral or just silent – to my upcoming performance-recitation Exorcism of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine on 15 August (The Best American Poetry, 26 April, 2024), as well as hurting my feelings, has rather surprised me. Crazy, dangerous, pointless, they’ve said. One was so angry, he refused to speak to me for several weeks.

The emoting, worried reasoning and confrontation is all very nice – I reckon it shows I’m loved or at least company good enough not to lose for a whim – but doing my theory of “Real Presence – or “Being With”, as I say for dance – is really important for making the world I live in, and, especially, for making the world I want to live in.

Here’s my apology to friends for doing what I want to do. You can use it as a model next time you need to, as we say, step out for fags.  

First off, physical danger. Kyiv isn’t Sarajevo 1992-96.

Even if the Russian Federation has a lot of the crazy-weird Republika Srpska about it and President Vladimir Putin has a lot of Srpska’s psycho-killer Radovan Karadzic in him, the ex-KGB counterintelligence colonel and romantic éminence grise in his own action-hero comic book and would-be Reichs Kanzler sans bottes ni moustache is not Srpska’s Columbia-educated psychiatrist-cum-Prime Minister trying out a half-baked archetype theory on live subjects. He can’t get close enough to knock it down with artillery, which is cheap.

Thanks to the expense of missiles, Kyiv 2024 nightmare scenario has more fever-dream dread than actual rocket bomb in the ambiance. Living it is more like living the inside of Winston Smith’s head after he’s been well worked over than anything else. Kyiv 2024 is awful in its own, special way because so much of it is fear and fear is so personal.

Come to think of it, the people of Kyiv, and of Ukraine, are being forced to cosplay the paranoid goop inside the heads of the likes of Putin, Karadzic, Alex Jones, Q or a 17-year-old whose Dad has bought him an AR-15. It’s the apocalypse: Welcome to the new age. Not so much deadly as scary.

As for pointlessly acting out my Real Presence/Being With theories in a scary place.

Well, off-hand, the idea of the performance seems to cheer up the people on the spot. That’s a lot of what I am wanting to do and most of what I can do.

Cheering up works for the neighbors, works for friends, why not people in Ukraine? As far as the country’s material needs and my competences and resources match up, I’ve got little to give. I’m no sharp-shooter, I can’t give the country an annual budget or guns or bombs, or do political action much beyond voting hard.

Moral support isn’t much, but it is mostly what I am, we are limited to here-below. Why not go for it when I can? And go for it with gusto?

Anyhow, doing little things – the things comfortable and rational middle-aged men and women friends call crazy, dangerous and pointless – does count on the cosmological significance scale; the silly old proverb about wanting a nail is actually up-to-date quantum mechanics. For want of my nutty, risky, senseless action, the world I imagine may or not n/ever be.

The minimal sense of agency in the little-things insight keeps me breathing; it kept Emerson from despairing; Whitman built an ontology on it and Thoreau, a way to live and a politics.

Because I have agency because I’m here is why I am calling my performance-recitation “Exorcism of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine on 15 August” Real Presence.

Real Presence will be in three parts – “Song of Self”, “Black Nail” and “Exorcism”. I’ll publish the version of it that comes on the day and post the video on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

The three-part organization of the piece reflects my belief that the initial consciousness of somewhere with somebody at sometime empowers the construct “Self”, I, and, thus, “Other”, You, and, in doing that, realizes “Belonging”, We, Ourselves.

Politically, this belief imagines out as a (non “Marxist”) society and culture based on “Equality, Freedom, Solidarity” over a society based on Freedom, Equality, Solidarity. That is, a personal, social and culture construct with moral equality of all persons rather than one based on legal, but not moral, equality of morally free citizens.

I think it’s the place of equality in the old slogan-syllogism of enlightenment politics that we’re fighting over today. Winning the war for the people of Ukraine – and it’s a political, not a military question – is the sharp end of the fight for existential, real equality.  

In my theory of art, Real Presence translates as striving to generate a state of “Being With”, conjuring the Imagination, the point where narrative begins or, rather, the un-narrative space where other scenarios may come to be.

I’ll be giving a seminar on Being With and, especially, on “Equality, Freedom, Solidarity: Experience, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman” following my performance of Real Presence. I’ll also be interviewing a woman fighter and an LGBTQ+ -oriented fighter on their experience of national conflict.

Finally, nodding to a photo of Vladimir Putin warmly squeezing the claw of a murderer on a recent front page of the Badische Zeitung, I invite each reader’s real presence, wherever that may be, between dawn and noon local time this coming Thursday, 15 August.